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Will IBM Watson Be Your Next Mayor?
MrSeb writes "When we think of computer networks, we think of routers and servers and fiber optic cables and laptops and smartphones — we think of the internet. In actuality, though, the visible internet is just the tip of the iceberg. There are secret military networks, and ad hoc wireless networks, and utility companies have sprawling, cellular networks that track everything from the health of oil pipelines and uranium enrichment machines through to the remaining capacity of septic tanks — and much, much more. What if we connected all of these networks to the internet, to form an internet of things? What if we then put a massive computer at the middle of this internet of things and used this wealth of data to power smart cars, smart homes, smart supermarkets, and smart cities? Unsurprisingly, IBM and Cisco are already working on such smart cities. For nearly two years, Rio de Janeiro's utilities, traffic systems, and emergency services has been managed by a single 'Ops Center,' a huge hub of technologies provided by both IBM and Cisco. With 300 LCD screens spread across 100 rooms, connected via 30,000 meters of fiber optic cable, Ops Center staff monitor live video from 450 cameras and three helicopters, and track the location of 10,000 buses and ambulances via GPS. Other screens output the current weather, and simulations of tomorrow's weather up to 150 miles from the city — and yet more screens display heatmaps of disease outbreaks, and the probability of natural disasters like landslides. There's even a Crisis Room, which links the Ops Center to Rio's mayor and Civil Defense departments via a Cisco telepresence suite. This sounds awesome — but is it really a good idea to give a computer company (IBM is not an urban planner!) so much control over one of the world's biggest cities?"
I just hope that the user interface doesn't include the disaster bar. I know that setting off a volcano in your city center can add excitement and all, but that would be going too far.
I cannot wait for the first sex scandal.
I'd rather have Watson as my mayor than Kim Kardashian(yes, there are rumors she wants to run for mayor out in California)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
The malware purveyors are peeing themselves in excitement at the very thought.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That sounds awesome, but they should definitely call the City Management software Wilkins instead of Watson.
So, rather than Colossus taking over by force, we're going to hand it the world on a plate?
Sounds good to me but we've got to get it off to a good start and then not mess with it later.
Available only if you spend 10,000 credits on S.A.A.T. licenses.
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
http://wiki.evageeks.org/Magi So there needs to be three Watsons per city, and giant robots piloted by teenagers to protect them.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
It was called Paranoia.
God spoke to me
This network will clearly turn evil and kill all humans. That is why need more research into prevention of evil and genocidal impulses in artificial intelligence before we create networks like this.
All the traffic lights are computer controlled
Speed sensors and cameras on the roads
They are installing fiber optics in the subways
What exactly is the problem?
"Experts have admonished that this battle cannot be won on the supply side."
(bzzzt)
"What is the War on Drugs?"
"That is correct!"
I'll start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Archons
And this is the kind of reason why IBM sold of the POS division that was doomed to irrelevancy and thin profit margins.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
That 'Q' didn't look quite right.
Is it really a good idea to give hackers so much control over one of the world's biggest cities?
IBM (at least Research) hires smart people : doctors, mathematicians, engineers so I think calling it 'just' a computer company is missing something
Funny to see this posted barely a month after http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/20/1410215/the-risk-of-a-meltdown-in-the-cloud given that a similar reasoning as in the former article can be applied here, and catastrophic failures in both sorts of systems are likely inevitable. The difference is that a failure in the cloud won't have the disastrous consequences of a failure of a fully automated and integrated, largely autonomous City Management System. Having humans in the mix adds human error, but it likely decreases the likelihood of some types of massive system-wide failures that common sense would otherwise avert; more importantly, the high level of integration implied by such a system is the biggest problem, just as much as it's the biggest contributor to the expected increased efficiency.
I'd rather live in a poorly run city than in one where large-scale non-natural disaster strikes and potentially causes significant death and destruction, or worse (imagination is the limit).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
looks like capitalism is finally catching up. i doubt it'll go well.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
What we really need is new memes. *yawn*
....by James Blish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight).
This is where the city has supercomputers regulate the day to day life of a city. How long until we reach that point in time?
What could possibly go wrong?
As someone linked yesterday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
AccountKiller
As soon as a terrorist group (or even some group wanting to only "fiddle" with the controls) finds it or learns how to hack into it's controller's seat, it's value sinks or clears to Zero.
Why this need - on small, not-so-smart minds for ONE of anything? Yes, you've gotta have a "whole" city's paying-power to make such systems affordable is one possible defense. But why not a more hierarchical arrangement, with fail-over backup capabilities to handle other sectors' work, if that sector gets hacked or knocked out? ...a bit like the Internet.
What if we connected all of these networks to the internet, to form an internet of things?
I think if we do all that, then fears of "cyber terror" become legit rather than farcical.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
does this mean cisco gets its own icon as well? I mean, thinking back to the last slashvertisement I saw im pretty sure Plantronics is probably feeling a bit burned, what with only getting a 15 minutes of video commercial time on slashdot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I enjoy Asimov's stories but I had no idea that IBM was using them as a business plan.
... until, at 2:14 am Eastern time on August 29, it becomes self-aware...
Screw parks and rec.
When the alternative is for it to be completely out of control, then yes, that's probably the better option.
I mean, sure, when they're disconnected and disjointed systems, one going down every couple days for extended periods, it won't gain the kind of press a single, major, centralized outage for a few hours would, but you're really far better off. Think of it as cars versus jets... People are far more afraid of the one that they're considerably safer in.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Is politics malware for people?
Automated systems can make very complex decisions based on lots of data, but they are not "smart" in quite the same way people are. In particular while computers can to a fantastic job of finding an optimal solution, the difficulty is in deciding on the merit function you are trying to optimize. It is not an easy question - what is the optimization function for a city?
On the one hand, it sounds amazingly futuristic, and it could theoretically be used to help track crime waves, serial killers, diseases, drug dealing, and so on through observing trends without invading anyone's individual privacy.
However, it also has the potential for misuse as a tool for creating a police state.
Like most technologies, it can be used for good or for evil. Let's hope the people who get to use it are responsible and dutiful.
I'm asking before I decide how I feel about the idea of Watson as my mayor. I live in Washington, DC, so I need to make an informed decision considering the context of what the word 'mayor' means around here.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If you don't want a computer company tying together and coordinating such data center systems, who would you like to have do so?
The media companies? Health care providers, perhaps? How about game companies like Nintendo?
Uncoordinated and unmanaged data is all but useless. The fact that all this data feeds into reporting by a central system does not mean the system is in control. I have no doubt there are still a few hundred actual operations staff involved.
Or did you think the monitors were for the benefit of an AI like Watson?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Rio de Janeiro is probably the last city I would want my city modeled on in relation to traffic management and emergency services.
Traffic has to be the worst of any city I have been too. The stats for the country as a whole are 20% of the number of vehicles of the US, but almost the same number of fatalities. On 15km stretch of road to work (12-14 lanes) I see at least two collisions (well, the results of), daily!
The public transport is a nightmare. Buses pullover anywhere for passengers slowing everyone down. Nobody lets the buses pullout so the buses never pull into the designated stops. The train is insecure full stop.
No coordination between services. So when a stretch is being resurfaced, diversions are ad-hoc, so buses have to re-route by making-it-up-as-they-go-along.
No traffic enforcement, so unless you discharge a fire arm (it happens), its unlikely the Policia Militar will even blink.
O melhor do melhor do mundo? Sacanagem, porra!
if lobbyist control input to politics, then who control the input to watson
This is exactly what the last Robot vignette is about.
CHRISTIANITY is the most destructive malware
Citation needed.
Pretty sure Christianity is more compassionate and charitable than destructive malwaric.
How do you bribe a computer?
CHRISTIANITY is the most destructive malware
Citation needed.
Pretty sure Christianity is more compassionate and charitable than destructive malwaric.
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I recently read how IBM made it possible for the Nazi Party to categorize every single person of any Jewish association in Germany.
I strongly urge you to read this, and think about the association here.
http://www.scribd.com/justgiving/d/12773933-IBM-and-the-Holocaust-Edwin-Black
What if we then put a massive computer at the middle of this Internet of things
You're doing it wrong.
You don't put a massive ANYTHING in the middle of a huge flow of data. Instead, you come up with ways to route the flow around the network to where the data needs to go, and you limit risk by isolating systems from each other, and creating APIs, Protocols, and Redundancy. There's a reason we're still able to use the Internet -- It was specifically designed to avoid such single points of failures.
Now, a distributed system? Yeah, maybe. Where you can hot swap out a chunk and the rest of the network keeps on trucking with little to no effect on the whole... yes. Where there's a big "Master Control Program" -- NO. That's not scalable. Individual specialised overseers, maybe.
This whole article says more about the author's lack of knowledge about Cybernetic Systems than anything else.
hopefully watson can see a troll input for what it is filtering lobbyist manipulations better than beleavers who react instinctively to defend those beleafs thus being pushed in to action that can and will be used against them!
I don't know that IBM/CISCO supplied it, but even we have a scaled down version of this in Anchorage, Alaska.
Anchorage, shortly after 9/11, desided it needed something along these lines. We are only about 300,000 people. If we have it, I would be suprised to find that anyplace larger than us does not.
I did visit ours a few years back, shortly after it was implemented. It's not in the scale or Rio's, but we don't have 6 million-plus people either. I don't recall seeing any IBM logos, but when you're the size of Rio, it's going to take a larger company to do this sort of thing, What are the options?
I suspect that the system could easily be gamed. You notice a bunch of farmers blah blahing about a farmer's market so you ask for a building permit on the "Carrot Friendly" building. The computer puts two and two together and poof you have building approval with the computer thinking it has solved two problems. Or you pay 100 people to write in and say there aren't enough stripclubs replacing playgrounds. Bang the computer rezones a playground. I would love to see an smart system provide an independent report as long it was more of a reality check. The city where I live (Halifax) banned chickens. A 5 year old could have told you that this was a case of some squeaky wheel hypochondriac worked up over bird-flu and not a serious problem for the 99.999 percent of the population.
Then there are the programmers or the company that makes the system. I can then see the system continuously suggesting intelligent this and that which IBM also is a provider of. Not to mention that if I were the programmer I could certainly use it solve some neighbourhood problems.
I see what you did there.
Those kind of "hacks" are what politics is all about. It may be crude but the powerful get what they want.
The wonderful thing with City Mayors, State Governors and sitting US Presidents is the entrapment of ... uh hum ... sex.
Be it Male-on-Male or Male-on-Female or Female-on-Female or Man-on-child or child-on-Female sex the temptations are just toooooo much for even the most 'Morman' of 'US anything' officials to resist ... just ask 'soon-to-be-ex-President' Obama-boy about his 'secret service GMC adventures into the deepest darkest southeast DC on late nights safari in search of a thight butt'.
LoL
have you seen the documentary on developing watson? it seems very smart in a very specific focus, but in the end it could not tell you its ass from a hole in the ground. its a very high speed database search on common phrases, not intelligence
and as far as the ops center? ohh increase number of LCD screen = better right? I invite you to look into LA's command center, or maybe NYC or any other grade A state of the art traffic center in the last 20 years, fuck my city of just over a million has more than three god damned helicopters, whats the news?
... and I'm glad it's happening in another country.
Watson mixes up Toronto and Chicago now Toronto does have a lot stuff copied from Chicago but still it may be a big mess to let Watson run stuff.
I can't believe no one has mentioned "The Return of the Archons" yet...
"GOD is on watsons side"
so is watson prolife? orelse he ant gona run my compound!
bravo good sirs
political hack ha haha
Is Watson NP hard on crime?
In halo odst a super computer controlled the whole city in South Africa. Interesting....
"This sounds awesome — but is it really a good idea to give a computer company (IBM is not an urban planner!) so much control over one of the world's biggest cities?"
I feel this question is moot considering the number of professionals likely consulting on these jobs. Just as it has been with the computer automation of any industry. You can't expect a group of computer scientists / engineers to slap this together on their own.
I also highly doubt that this is a centralized system with single attack vectors as some have speculated. This system is the culmination of multiple points of reference collected from multiple sub systems and quite intelligently parsed. It isn't as if the network that controls the traffic lights is wired directly into the water and electrical grids.
IBM Mayor:
-I for one welcome all my new loyal subjects.
My first mandate will be;
no one leaves!
Now BOW!
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
IBM programmers played a lot of Sim City!
Who cares how much shit there is a septic tank? The company that needs to empty it, that's who - and as TFA states, they're already connected to it. Utopian singularity retardedness.
P.S. the answer, as always, is "no".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A kind of animal that dams but isn't damned?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here's to Mayor Dunsel!
Did you ever see what IBM did with his system management software suite, namely Tivoli? I am absolutely sure I don't want them managing my city. There would never been enough taxes to pay for an upgrade and patch the software once a month. And if there is, I am about sure the upgrade will fail or the CPU will top at 100% for no reason.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I think some people are missing the point: This system isn't making automated decisions for the city on a scale that isn't already being done in many places (automatic adjustment of traffic lights based on traffic conditions, for instance). Most of this is the aggregation of data which is then displayed in some form of useful visualization or is synthesized into some supposedly useful metric. There are still human decision makers. If the system is taking a flood of data and is even mildly successful at alerting decision makers when there is a problem that needs further action, what is the issue? My field is machine learning and decision support. This is a decision support application. Decision support is about getting the relevant knowledge to decision makers. As to what knowledge is relevant, and how to transform data into that knowledge, that's really at the center of what IBM is trying to do. Traffic control systems, epidemiological 'heat maps,' surveillance cameras, etc... are already widely deployed around the world. This system just routes them onto TV screens in the same room and tries to make some sense of some of it. It has not the power to enslave, nor is it capable of launching a nuclear attack.
The version I heard was that HAL in 2001 was actually named from the very high level Houston Aeronautical Language, the assumption being that it and the systems it ran on would evolve into HAL.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A computerised system as ruler is a great idea. But to be a true democracy it has to be open source with democratically voted in patches to the source code.
Say the Ruler starts developments in public parklands that the majority doesn't want. Just submit a patch "-if (isParkland() ) develop(); +if (isParkland() ) protect();" Have patches voted on at each election cycle. The patches that get a majority go into the codebase and the Ruler program then runs this new patched code that people have elected it to run.
A few hundred years of evolution of such a program should produce a great Ruler. One that isn't susceptible to corruption or greed but instead rules exactly to a prescribed program that has been refined to perfection.
Yes I really do look forward to our computer overlords.
TFS: "Other screens output the current weather ..."
Sometimes I wonder if such progress also leads to a mental state one might suspect to be associated with troglodytes, in times when oh so many individuals and organisations have caved in regards the pressures of corporations and governments.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
*bzzzzzzzt* AAARGH!
(Random Alpha Centauri flashback here.)
I just hope that the user interface doesn't include the disaster bar. I know that setting off a volcano in your city center can add excitement and all, but that would be going too far.
I believe you could retain a functional disaster bar by simply installing Windows ME. I think they called it the "start menu", though. You could sandbox your SimCity instances too, and make it (slightly) recursive.
Please forward these worthy suggestions to Watson, the present mayor of Ottawa. I'm sure the mayor can rustle up some Canadian federal support for these fine initiatives.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So, the question posed is really, "Do we want city managers and emergency workers to have so much information at their fingertips?"
Large, integrated information systems do not give control without automation. The system does very little more than allow a person to make better decisions because they're based on better information.
Criminals, cronies, political hacks?
well but the politicians, economist as well as geeks prefer one neat and unified solution which equals monoculture. It is not bad except that viruses and criminals alike like t hat sort of arrangements too. Nature has experimented with high specialization and this drive towards it seems to be natural itself yet it is very unreasonable to follow it to its 'conclusion' where instance of one system control it all.
We give a lot of power to unqualified people already through the democratic process. Given their background in managing complex systems on an enterprize/global scale, I'd trust IBM more than Arnold Schwarzenegger, or someone who majored in political science...
What if we connected all of these networks to the internet, to form an internet of things?
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, do you really want some Iranian 12 year old hacking your traffic lights or sewer system?
I'm sure anonymous and it's kin would LOVE it if we put computers in charge of every city in the world ... ;)
What could possibly go wrong?
SELECT *
FROM dbo.human_resources.employees
INTO dbo.outsourced.fired
Colossus comes to mind. That computer took over the world.
I think the idea is to build synergistic systems everyone benefits from
Resedients can look forward to having a maniacal computer trigger some PLCs to mix waste products with their cereal...
A talk by Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, was posted on TED today. Fast forward to 9:00 get a look at their command center.
What's the difference between the mayor of your city and Watson? One's a cold-hearted machine that cares for nothing but the betterment of its corporate masters... and the other is a supercomputer designed by IBM!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uAP6HaHXnc
Primm Slim has been elected your local sheriff. The good news is that he'll never become violent with you, since he has no combat AI. The bad news is that he'll never become violent with criminals, since he has no combat AI.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
... created an optimized damage and destruction event via internet access to all this data....???
Locks are for honest people....
Bob Cringely has been saying that IBM is poised to sell off or lay off the majority of its North American workforce.
http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/by-2015-IBM-will-look-like-oracle/
So do that mean the mayor's staff will be semi-anonymous call center employees in some other country?
We must dissent! (we must dissent) WE MUST DISSENT.
Well, that's one idealistic utopias of mine. To have a technology driven dictatorship. We already have the tools. We just need to educate ourselves and our children that representative democracy comes with too much human power, and that brings to surface the worst side of human kind. To exerce power over other humans, to subjugate our own kind in favour of corporations and institutions full of interest for profit, and not to the evolution of mankind. I'm talking about full direct democracy, like Iceland crowdsourcing their constitution and laws, with a online bidding systems like eBay for public civil contracts and development, centralized and unified banking, financial and economic system, ruled and governed by an open-source system, where the taxes fees paid yesterday could be put on projects needed today. We as human beings towards trans-humanist thinking and status-quo need to evolve and embrace such ideals.
Many of the Developing Nations' Cities have a pattern whereby the HUMAN population constantly makes adjustments in behaviour to regularise movement resource usage group or mob decisions. Most of the things that happen in large scale have inherent inefficiencies but they play a part in the COMFORT of said population. To automate the whole shebang would result in plenty of pain .... and someone taking a baseball bat to the ... well ... basement computer.
Im guessing this system is gonna just provide information, and its up to the city officials to make the right decisions based on ground reality and reporting from the scene.
If they are half-arsed about cross-referencing the data before making important decisions ... then we can all go back to living in caves ...
Watson is just a specific (but amazing) example of the use of analytics to solve our societal challenges...now and in the future (coming soon to a community near you). All analytics does is sift through the ever-increasing mountains of data our engineered and industrial society produces on a daily basis as well as data generated by instrumentation of the natural world. Humans will never be able to do that...our biology holds us back...we are not designed for such tasks (why does R. L. Gore and Associates try to limit the number of humans at each of their sites? - look it up on NPR.org). Let the machines sift through all the data and present anomalies and patterns to us in visual form - so we can make more informed decisions. That is really all the Intelligent Operations Center in Rio does...the Mayor and his managers make the decisions...and are held accountable for them. I am now working on a concept about better government by design - attempting to architect a solution to the mess we call local government in America. If/when implemented, it should return politicians to their rightful and original place in government - as public servants, not public exploiters. I call it Smarter Local Government...stay tuned.