FUTURESCAPEs
LOOKING AROUND IN 2035 : MUMBAI
The Mumbai Suburban Railway is a network of inner suburban railway lines and commuter rail services that connect the Mumbai Metropolitan Region to outlying suburbs.
The system spans 390 km and operates 2,342 trains daily, carrying thousands of commuters across one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
As of December 2022, approximately 66 million commuters travelled on Mumbai's local trains.
The Mumbai Local trains ferry over 7.5 million commuters across its networks every DAY.
This is more than double the population of Los Angeles.
The first few AI systems developed specifically for mass transit went live for testing simultaneously with the New York City Transit Authority as well as the London Underground. Other metropolises quickly began to take notice. With the push away from dirty energy also came the move towards efficient and safe mass transit, with Mumbai city leading the Indian AI developers in a race to work out a contextual solution.
Facial Recognition, Numerical sorting and Counter-terrorism AI systems :
Facial Recognition, Numerical sorting and Counter-terrorism AI systems :
Safety survey and overcrowding alerts, AI System deployment : Mumbai 2035
With a slew of developers feeding off lucrative AI contracts, a variety of ancillary industries took off. A local Drone builder won a contract to feed the AI system aerial data across the suburban stations and their surrounding areas.
This valuable data allowed railway stations to be more responsive to surges in crowds, seasonal flooding and other factors, as well as festivals and cricket matches. The deployment of personnel, resources and safety officers increasingly were informed by data coming from the new inter-connected AI systems.
AI databases for platform vendors and unique identification systems : Mumbai 2035
The overcrowding and associated daredevilry of Mumbai’s train commuters may be fascinating, but there is a huge price to be paid.
Every year, almost 2000 people are killed along the rail network. In the decade of 2002-12, 36,512 people lost their lives, while 36,688 were injured.
The next round of prosthetic AI driven safety systems introduced a whole new element into the suburban train travel paradigm, making sure casualties were minimised an documented in detail.
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The new AI driven infrastructure was soon deployed to regulate train schedules, define routes and predict maintenance schedules, creating a robust partnership between the intelligence and the city’s arterial network.
With the push for solar transition also came the AIdriven energy optimisation and a move towards a more efficient cleaner transportation paradigm. Commuters also reported a drop in congestion at peak hours due to a responsive realtime train scheduling, through powerful passenger pattern analysis.
There has now been initiated a widespread loss of jobs, with numbers steadily dropping amongst one of the highest employers of Humans in the country. The “always-on” status of the AI sentries has already created dipping attention amongst the few human operators, with the base notion that safety is now guaranteed by the AI system.
The system has not yet encountered ethical dilemmas with the automatic braking system, and it remains to be seen how public response reacts to these grey areas.
The End is Here.