How viable is to have the benefits of smart cities without all the surveillance apparatus that comes with it in the actual state of the technology and politics?
It’s too darn convenient to use technology to surpress a population. Any crisis, intentional or not, politicians will use it to that end.
This begs the question, would it be possible in a world without politicians? In an anarchist society, for example, where capitalism and the state have been abolished, could there be a technologically-advanced “smart city” that did not violate anyone’s privacy? I think that that is the more interesting question. In the world as it is today, of course this would not work.
Doesn’t ‘smart’ implies the action of ‘monitoring’ whatever is being ‘smarted’, in order to be able to react to any event concerning that whatever?
So, data would be collected. The nature of data being to be processed, information would then be gathered about that whatever. And then, people and society being what they are, said data will be used to gain some edge.
It’s a bit like imagining that, unlike all the others, one would remain a nice guy even if becoming a billionaire. That won’t happen. Such levels of fortune implies to be merciless… no matter how generous one can also be.
I mean. In a limited scale. The problem with surveillance is other humans and wanting to use the data for personal uses usually personal gain. Some theoretical abstract neutral ai that does not care about sex or propriety or whatnot it would not be so bad. If the laws were also sane that is.
One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.
This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.
Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.
So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.
As for the collecting data. It can be done, if the right sensors are used. For example a movement or magnet sensor to trigger a traffic light or weight sensors to measure how full train cars are. If a city has fare gates, those might be used to count usage as well.
Also open source code for public infrastructure would go a long way to help with that.
Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.
I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.
For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.
What benefits are you thinking of?
Define “smart city”?
Yes.
“CIA didn’t like that”
