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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?
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.'"
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.
Smart people.