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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?
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.
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
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.
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"?
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.