Feature Smart cities Where will the Internet of things take us?

SMART CITIES FEATURE

ON THE ROAD TOWARDS SMART CITIES

We find ourselves approaching science fiction at ever-higher speeds, as cities grow ever more intelligent. There will be doomsayers but there are also serious, tangible benefits to living in connected cities

Imagine a highway that knows you’re travelling on it or a street that knows where you’re going. Imagine shopping in a store without human staff. Imagine never having to own a car because you can just get into an autonomous vehicle at any time and be taken to your destination. Imagine emergency services able to respond to your location because your vital signs have dipped – all without human intervention. That’s the promise of the so-called ‘smart’ city, an interconnected environment designed to change that way that people live, work and interact.

Self-driving cars have their place here, as do the wholly contactless Amazon Go stores that dispense with human staff and use cameras to tell what you’re buying. Apple’s newest Watch, with its ECG and ability to alert emergency services in the States? Or Huawei’s Kirin-based NPUs (neural processing units) currently being turned towards the field of medical diagnostics? Those are also a part of the burgeoning smart city. It’s a bit like a smart home, except those can be constructed by anyone with a set square. A city needs a little more planning, smart cities require considerably more of a runup. weather or natural disaster and confer the most benefit on most of the population in order to succeed. But that sort of technical achievement doesn’t just fall out of the sky – it’s the result of buy-in from all sectors of society, from tech-makers to governments to industry to the average person in the street. And these cities have the potential to make life much simpler.

Living in reality This futuristic vision is closer than you’d expect. Projects are in full swing in Dubai, London, San Francisco, Seoul, Shenzhen and Tokyo, hoping to be the first to develop fully self-driving cars. The reality is that LIDAR and cameras, while multifunctional, can only do so much. A connection to a fully integrated city would make self-driving cars a tangible reality a whole lot faster. But that means we need to change how we design cities.

Which is on the go in several parts of the world. Google was involved in a recently-shuttered project called Quayside in Toronto, Canada, that serves as an example of how not to build a smart city. Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai are experimenting with robotic assistants. Oslo, Norway, now features intelligent public lighting and eases traffic congestion via smart license plate readers. New York is in on the action via initiatives driven by the city’s Office of Technology Innovation. Barcelona, the home of Mobile World Congress and a mecca for smartphone users, features heavy Internet of Things integration, wide-spread (and free) internet access and also has buy-in by the city’s administration to keep the public informed using a series of hyper-local apps.

All of which are ideal candidates for actions to be carried out here in South Africa, most likely starting in Cape Town. It sounds like something they would do. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg, which might make some folks uncertain.

Rightfully nervous It’s quite normal to be hesitant about connected cities. They call for a level of intrusion into private lives that has never been seen before – though the likes of Mark Zuckerberg reckon that personal privacy is a thing of the past. You might already be carrying around a tracking device (you call it a cellular phone) but offering up biometric data and bank account data in order to facilitate convenience can quite easily backfire.

It’s a question of power and who is wielding it. A fully integrated city, reporting to a single authoritarian government, is a dystopian nightmare. Every citizen’s location and activities are constantly known and any dissent from the ruling norms can easily be met with overwhelming force. Once that sort of power has been given away, it’s not very easy to get back. Entire genres of popular

SMART CITIES FEATURE

fiction are built on that fact and… well, they’ve got a point. Any government, around the world, would battle to demonstrate that it can be trusted with this unprecedented view of its citizens’ movements, preferences and thoughts. There are several ways around putting this control into too few hands – a form of digital communism, or a quite literal robot revolution.

Rise of the machines Either systems that control smart cities are open to as many people as possible, both facilitating improved services while also guarding against abuse by ensuring that this literal power isn’t hoarded, or… we give most of the control over smart cities to AI. While artificial intelligence systems are known to have bias, this can be accounted for and worked out of the system. And, without a human behind the wheel, a properly instructed AI could go about making life better for citizens without prejudice. To boldly go… This sort of overreaching control is far in the future, no matter how close it might seem right now. There are issues looming in the distance that we haven’t even considered, spurred on by the adoption of an always-connected planet and increasing use of artificial intelligence in everyday life. There are bound to be mistakes and missteps along the way and the only truly incorrect way to approach the adoption of smart cities is to refuse to learn from those faults.

Correctly done, intelligent cities will facilitate a more comfortable life for residents while also reducing the resource cost of maintaining that population. The so-called fourth industrial revolution, being touted by South Africa’s government, leads down this road and it’s an exciting one to travel.

But it’s also a long road. Every aspect of connected life must function as an integrated whole for a city to be classed as

Correctly done, intelligent cities will facilitate a more comfortable life for residents while also reducing the resource cost of maintaining that population.

‘intelligent’. WiFi access? Speedy, universal and free for everyone. Power utilities have to speak to your mobile devices. Cars? Universally self-driving, or humandriven vehicles need to be confined to specific areas. Your banking provider and your favourite store need to get along and, most importantly, the people living in this city need to trust that the massive amounts of data being generated and analysed to provide a never-before-seen standard of living won’t be used against them. And that’s perhaps the largest hurdle to clear.

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1 No place like home

Your apartment building could be ready to receive you, no matter what time of day or night you arrive. Climate control sets itself to your preferred configuration, lighting is just so, and the geyser activates in time for a hot shower.

2 A light in the darkness

Intelligent lighting may be used to selectively illuminate, reducing draw on power utilities when there aren’t any human eyes to need the light. Detecting vehicles or pedestrians, lighting brightens to visually acceptable levels. There’s also potential use for disaster management.

The building of a smart city

Intelligent cities don’t just organically spring from the ground, like mushrooms. They must be cultivated, like expensive mushrooms.

Q Starting point Experts agree that there is no single starting point for a connected city. You just begin, somewhere – eventually all the systems should integrate into a greater whole able to respond to the needs of a population. Q Trust exercise One of the largest roadblocks on the road to the city of the future is its residents. They need to trust that expanded monitoring will be wholly used to their benefit and not to their detriment – a tough ask in 2020. Q Pilot’s license You can’t plop any old system into a city and call it good. Prospective projects must be vetted and tested in a smaller scale before being sent out to serve humanity. You only get one chance at doing it right.

3 In case of emergency…

In the event of an emergency, emergency services can be intelligently dispatched. Best of all, continued monitoring by interconnected systems could let the paramedics know how serious the situation is before they arrive, without needing human intervention.

4 Droning on and on

The next phase of transportation, after autonomous vehicles, is autonomous flying taxis. Smart cities have the potential to selfdirect air traffic without tasking a human with watching the whole system. Amazon’s drone army will be able to drop packages at last.

5 Air traffic

Enhanced security practises could greatly speed up transit, getting you cleared through airport security quicker and without needing to be extensively groped on the way through the metal detector. Greater tracking accuracy means always being on time (or knowing why not). In a truly smart city, you’re using contactless payment. Public transportation is a dream – just hop on a train, a taxi or a bus, and your fare is deducted as you enter or exit. Since services are autonomous, trips are quicker and safer.

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6 Can you take me higher

Facial recognition systems in highrise buildings, be they commercial or residential, lead to a situation where elevators know where everyone is going as soon as they enter. The result? You’re off to your

7 Going public

floor with a minimum of waiting.

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