Slashdot Mirror
Most of What We Need For Smart Cities Already Exists
An anonymous reader writes "Looking to a day when modern infrastructure is network addressable, Glen Martin considers that, lacking only requisite content and relatively simple augmentation, most of what we need for smart cities already exists: 'Using smart phones, pedestrians could "wake up" the objects by accessing codes generally used by the city to identify street items that required repair. Each bit of infrastructure would make some kind of declamatory statement — sometimes gracious and welcoming, sometimes didactic, sometimes peevish. The "interlocutor" would then respond, and a brief exchange would ensue. The object would then invite the passerby to return for more conversation.'"
What?
Because that's how you get your phone stolen.
For some reason the summary reminds me of Camazotz from "a wrinkle in time" -- mainly how out of place someone without a lojack/smart phone would feel walking around .. noticing people talking to fucking streetlamps like a PCP addled loony.
Real question is.. why? what purpose does this serve? Oh right tracking+advertising -- the holy grail of modern civilization.
is to build cities on rock and roll. Bernie said to.
What in the name of Jesus Christ is the summary actually talking about?
This comment is rated both 'Declamatory' and 'Peevish'.
If everything in life synchronizes for me as well as this summary, April Fool's will be a nightmarish Groundhog's Day with no Bill Murray.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Being tracked and pestered because I'm walking around with my mobile on, to activate stuff, would be a nuisance (I feel it's a nuisance that it rings, it's for me calling people, not the other way around ;-)
And like it or not, you'd be tracked, even if everyone promised you were not being tracked.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
converse with a pothole when I can just call up the city Public Works Department right now to the same effect?
It seems like all this 'smartness' is just being used to make things as annoying and publicly pressured, tracked, and monitored as possible. This would just further encourage me to NOT carry any cellnet devices. I'll pass, especially if the taxpayer has to fund it.
Also, because the leaderships in our supposedly 'free' nations have repeatedly proven themselves too immature to handle that kind of power, I don't want them given any more metrics than they already have. Networks like this can always be used to surveil the nodes connected to them.
Nobody really knows what a smart city is, but it nominally means networked, efficient, and sustainable. Efficiency doesn't include shitting on people when their phone battery dies. It's about aggregating information and acting on it, basically business intelligence on a city scale, to enable people to go about their business. It should be completely transparent to the people in the city. Automated systems would count pedestrian and traffic flows in different areas and adjust light timing, add public transportation units and generally make life easier for the populace. But also, net heat producers feed net heat consumers and so on, it's not so much a thing you build as a level of development you reach. It's not like we're needing whole new cities; indeed, several nations have whole cities standing empty, and whole cities' worth of houses standing empty mixed in besides.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
PANOPTICON
Hey! Welcome to your 24 hour, digital prison, fellow technophiles! It's COOL! I knw, 'cos there's a TED talk about how you will never be worried again in a Smart City, and WIRED magazine had a profile on it, too - from a real MIT PhD, with a research grant from a CIA funded think-tank.
BTW: Here's your ankle-bracelet. The health club provided it free, for your exercise routine! Keep up - or your insurance rates will skyrocket... You have Facebook, right? Better. That's the deal that Aetna cut with your employer.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've seen presentations by serious believers, who were mounting a smartphone-dialed-infrastructure-repair campaign in Providence RI. The people were genuine, and the blighted repairs were real. But it seems that plumbers and pothole-fixers and infrastructure repairers could hack the system and get work where and when they wanted it, and the mob history of public works in the Northeast isn't fiction. Just as the wikipedia articles of interest to big interest groups eventually get written "correctly", and just as the longshoreman's union is not to be crossed, this too will be infiltrated like bad code - unless like a good software writer they go into it saying it's difficult, not easy.
Gently reply
Instead of this pointless and down right weird crap how about you think about something useful? Maybe integrated traffic signal networks that can detect buildups via peoples cell phones and then adjust traffic light timings to break it up. Or use the fine grained data that you would have for assessing the effectiveness of public transport systems.
20 years ago I saw an article published in Air & Space describing a bold NASA plan to cover the moon in solar panels to collect energy and beam the power via a network of microwave relays in satellites to receiving stations around the globe; you could shut down every power plant in the world and provide enough of the world's energy needs several times over. It would only have cost a paltry $20 trillion in 1995 dollars.
Just because you can technically do something doesn't mean you can practically do it. Logistics, distribution, and dissemination of technology is a far more challenging and important mountain to climb than surpassing the technical challenges.
I'll take safer streets and a good economic environment over all this high-tech fluff, if you please. Yes, smartphones are convenient and all, but "smart cities"? What's the point, really? Let's leave this to entrepreneurs to figure out how to do the bleeding edge stuff. Government is never best at that sort of thing. This guy is basically taking about art, not utility. At the moment, that seems an egregious waste of scant tax dollars when the government is already barely able to fulfill it's most basic obligations, and has been running deficits for years.
Granted, this was talking about a city in England. Maybe they have money to burn. Here in the US, our government has been running in the red for years, and it's not looking like that will change anytime soon.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
and he interacts with fire hydrants just fine. What is the problem being solved again? I had trouble understanding the geeklish in TFA.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
is Smart People. Invest in education.
All of this technology is great, especially if you focus upon the stuff that will make actual improvements in the quality of life and ignore the fluff. Yet most of the cities that I've lived in have management problems rather than technological problems. These problems include the failure to make decisions, the failure to do proper planning before implementation, the failure to communicate between (or even within) departments, and the failure to allocate resources. And all of those failure assume city managers are making an honest effort to fulfill their responsibilities. In reality you have to also factor in everything from sloth, to corruption, to over-zealousness.
While some of those issues can be diminished by the technology behind "smart cities", none of those issues can actually be solved with technology.
Smart people.
It's been noted that Bluetooth did wonders for the mentally ill--the schizophrenic talking to himself or imaginary creatures is now presumed to be using the headset on the other side of his head. This allowed them to fit in better with the rest of society.
Now we have the possibility that you can talk to a wall or a lamp post and be regarded as perfectly sane and normal.
It isn't really done though, until we come up with a way to interface with technology that requires screaming at the top of your lungs and urinating in random directions. Get on that right away.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/santander-a-digital-smart-city-prototype-in-spain-a-888480.html
For the simple fact that there is a massive pre-existing stuff which doesn't have this.
It is either a gimmick, and won't catch on -- or it's going to require the entire infrastructure to be rebuilt around it, and won't catch on.
A lot of these futurist things are hypothetically feasible on a small scale. But on a really large scale it falls apart, because nobody could ever afford to do anything with it.
I predict it won't get much past the level of geo-caching ... you can seek out a device which you can interact with, and that will be geeky and cool. But in terms of becoming widespread of practical, it's pure speculative "wouldn't it be cool if".
It sounds cool, but it will never happen in any meaningful way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This entire article is one long buzzword, I feel like I'm sitting in a motivational seminar just reading it. I like the general idea of giving everyday objects an ability to query and be queried, but to be any more than a novelty you'd need to automate the query code somehow (OCR, Bar code/reader, RFID, etc). But you've also got a pretty big cataloging & logistical issue, you have to code & catalog everything you might use (lamp posts, manhole covers, post boxes, stores, etc) and maintain that database. The next big problem is keeping it going over the long term, I work in local government and given the history in my field (mapping) I can tell you that there is a tendency for the interest in maintaining a project to ebb and flow quite significantly. Back in the 80s a massive amount of money was spent (at the state/federal level) to create some pretty detailed mapping, most of which was put on a shelf and forgot about, then in the 90s interest returned and tens of thousands of dollars were spent to digitize our information (local), then it sat on some hard drives for a decade and a half gathering dust, then interest returned & I was brought in to, convert, update & maintain the information. Each time the data had to basically be completely redone due to changes in format, methodology and/or technology. And each time significant amounts of money, time & resources were lost. Its all fine and dandy to create this kind of information/interactivity, but you have to make sure that its kept current, useful & active. Otherwise it is doomed to failure.
And armed drones so I guess that's a start.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Just euphemisms for big brother is watching and we own all your base.
Smartphones are "smart", that is, they can do a lot of things.
But smartphones can become very dumb when the user who use the phone is dumb.
So many users take their own naked photo using their "smart" phone and end up having their naked photos being circulated online
In similar vein --- smart cities, if filled with dumb residents --- will still end up to be dumb.
Stupid people will forever be stupid, and they will forever misuse the gadgets they can put their hands on.
A less abstract discussion about interacting with random stuff found on the street is currently held as "Car-To-X" communication. And that has an actual use.
bickerdyke
In what possible sense is taking a bunch of chatbots with different apparent personalities and assigning them to the object codes in a city a 'smart city'? Would using your GPS coordinates as seed values for customizing your chatbot give you a 'smart planet'?
I'd like to present some sort of cogent refutation; but the sheer magnitude of the 'what? I don't even... why?' leaves nothing to argue with...
Hasn't this already been done by Steve Martin?
Hello lamppost, whatcha knowin? I've come to watch your flowers growin
Ain't you got no ryhmes for me? Doo doo doo doo, feelin' groovy~
You beat me to it, you insensitive clod!
At least I get to supply the link: HELLO LAMPOST
Forget the talking lampposts and Wifi enabled potholes. Although it would be cool if traffic lights broadcast riddles and puzzles, awarding an immediate green light to the first driver to solve it.
My idea for a Smart City would be to re-vamp and modernize the CB radio concept, every vehicle would have a short range hands-free digital two way radio so drivers could speak to other drivers in close proximity: you could make general comments to all or incline your head towards a particular car and send a more private message. With a certain gesture after a reply was received, the system could 'lock' the connection so you could continue the conversation even after you leave the zone.
It's easy to see this as an absurd novelty that would be used to pass on road rage... and there would be a shake-down period in which that may be its most common use... but thinking past that I find a lot of promise in the idea. Pedestrians could join in. Cafes or other buildings could have a corner in which one could hear road-talk, or even participate. Little billboards would soon pop up, like a new era of Burma-Shave, that try to suggest topics or invite a response.
In other words, the Smartest thing to do is not award some sweetheart contract to a tech firm to 'redesign' the city at all. Don't mess with the damned city. Use technology to find new ways for the people in the city to communicate with one another. Every time we develop new technology that allows strangers with mutual interests to meet who would not otherwise meet (such as academia or the Internet) we take human evolution up a notch.
The only Smart City that I'd really want to live in would be one where all the buildings and road signs were on hydraulic struts, and everything bobs and dances like Toon Town.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Why in the world would anyone want to do that?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
ten thousand times to tell me I left it on.
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
n/t