Navigating the Smart City: From Data Highways to AI Governance
Our daily lives seem to revolve around smart phones and soon smart houses and smart cars, but what about the towns and cities we live in? Some months ago, I was at an event where a lot of discussion was taking place about urban planning and the various technologies we might incorporate into it, everything from vehicle charging stations to phone charging stations to phone charging stations to wifi coverage and money points in between. Ironically, for someone who dislikes living in cities, personally preferring my farm here in Plymouth, I always find city management and planning fascinating, or at least I have since playing Simcity on the Super Nintendo a few decades ago.
So the conversations on urban planning at that event cought my interest and I heard the term smart city getting used there which I'd heard in-passing else where in recent years but had never really heard it defined I asked some folks for more info on the general concept and I got a lot of fascinating but also often vague details and explanations some not matching others needless to say our goal in today's episode isn't really to try to better define a term that's still rather embryonic but rather to discuss the concept under its umbrella and what we'll see coming of it is both the hear and far future the term smart city has been growing in popularity in recent years doubtlessly due to the influence of the word smartphone and while many of the concepts involved are older than the widespread use of cell phone it seems that that the new term is here to stay .
A quick check of wikipedia which currently lists only 4US cities including columbus here in Ohio as smart cities give us a rather complicated opening definition seemingly heavy in technospeak that I will boil down as saying smart cities are those which collect and collate data and then use it in their mangement which of course pretty much defines any city or village or town that actually has someone managing it who is not utterly incompetent or lazy of course you collect data about your town and use it to make decisions form so obviously it's a matter of degrees here and as for the decisions we might throw in some automation too as a fairly simple example conceptually traffic lights that monitored flow rates based on the time of day and week and were able to adjust themselves to optimize traffic flow would be an example of a smart city device taking that the next step up we could have a timer on each that nearby cars could detect and set up on their console or HUD automatically giving the remaining countdown before it truns and we could also have ones that we could inform of uocoming roadwork or big events like a festival which would alter those ideal timings .
But the back end of that is that you can be using all those traffic counts and times to be predicting when you'll need to repair roads or expand existing segments and of course that's something civil engineers have been doing for years but the more improvements in making data collection up-to-date and cheaply collected the better this is also where we start seeing AI having a role as while AI is now finally in the public awareness for its chatbot ability as a real thing that exists not technology of twenty years from now it is generally much better for applications like real time traffic monitoring and learning how to predict and optimize traffic patterns than it is at writting a song for you right now to avoid smog for instance we otimize around minimum time spent just idling which is all for the good but it's less of a concern for electric cars or those which automatically shut off when not moving situations change a lot if we decide to start using more automatic in cars .
I don't like the term self-driving car it's not really accurate anyways plus it bugs people but having an auto-pilot that can keep you stay inside the lines doesn't really seem to bug folks any more than cruise control and our real objective is to allow maximum safe and convenient driving which at least for the immediate future is always ging to be at its best when any onboard computer is merely assisting a human as opposed to being in direct control you can make then work not to try to implement and as improvments come along they should get better cheaper and easier to make people comfortable with where that shifts over to becoming a city hall that is actually an artifical intelligence gets a bit blurry but I suspect folks will find letting a computer run their road crew dispatches is going to come easier than letting them run your tanks and fighter jets I would not expect andorid police to be a thing, especially for beat cops and crowd control, but the AI detective might be a thing, probably not the way we see with Eljiah Bailey and his humanoid android partner, R.Daneel Olivaw, in Isaac.
Would you have an actual AI that incorporates the mind of a city? may be something like a genus loci, the spirit of a place that we often see in some religions or myologies and which we have discussed as an option for maintaining space habitats, especially intentionally unpopulated ones like nature preserves. More likely, I think, than an actual AI that thought of itself as New York City or London, you would probably have something more like department deputies, the AI that helps the engineer's office for a town and might slowly evolve to become the actual chief engineer in a lot of counties in Ohio and other states. It's not unusual for there to be an elected department head and a deputy who does the work but avoids most of the credit or blame, and I could see this role shifting to something an AI is filling; indeed, I could imagine pathways to futures where the AI is registered as a person, has been doing the job for decades, and just in heritability the role or even gets elected to it. The notion of an AI who ran the road department in a small town deciding it wanted to move up and run for office in a bigger city is an interesting one to contemplate.
One could imagine a dozen or more different department AI who could be under a human city council or may or who may or may not be entirely human themselves anymore lots of cyborg and trans human option son the table unrelated to al this that are likely to play a big role anyway maybe they can engage in a temporary hive mind like the unimind we see with the eternals in marvel comics when a big decision needs making those might be changing too where you annex some word of neighboring city that had its own AI that now moves into the mix or instead of acity hive mind the twenty AI in the region who all handle power distribution or water or sewers have to bumpheads or merge them to plot out where to build the new water treatment facility or shift the load while one is being up graded .
Most people spend about 80000 hours of their life in their job, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years, and would prefer that time helped the world. 80000 hours is a lot of time, so it's a good idea to do some research on how best to use it, and that's where our friends at 80000 hours come in. They're a non-profit that spent a decade outside of academics at Oxford University researching which carees have the most impact, and all the research is on their website for free. Their website includes a lot of tools and resources to help you find your path. So see you all soon! I will upload my next blog very soon. Thank you for giving my blog your precious time.
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