Just because it can be done....
by Tom Sullivan Still from Minority Report (2002).
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. But then later there's running and screaming.
It is time again to review that classic narrative where a scientist invents something amazing, then halfway through the story that something is threatening the hero, his girlfriend, the world, and a pair of cute kids.
A Google spinoff named Sidewalk Labs hopes to build a mini "city of tomorrow" along the Toronto lakefront. It will be greener, smarter, more inclusive, etc., etc. But also "transparent," naturally.
Quayside, as the project is known, will be laden with sensors and cameras tracking everyone who lives, works or merely passes through the area. In what Sidewalk calls a marriage of technology and urbanism, the resulting mass of data will be used to further shape and refine the new city. Lifting a term from its online sibling, the company calls the Toronto project “a platform.”
But extending the surveillance powers of one of the world’s largest technology companies from the virtual world to the real one raises privacy concerns for many residents. Others caution that, when it comes to cities, data-driven decision-making can be misguided and undemocratic.
[...]
Nothing is too prosaic to analyze: Toilets and sinks will report their water use; the garbage robots will report on trash collection. Residents and workers in the area will rely on Sidewalk-developed software to gain access to public services; the data gathered from everything will influence long-term planning and development.
It's all about "efficiency." Just as hearing terms like "right-sizing" and "shareholder value" around the office means it's time to update your resume, you don't have to be Fritz Lang to notice efficiency for some always seems to come at the expense of others.
Renee Sieber, a professor of geography and environment at McGill University, utters a word of caution:
“Democracy and the rights of citizens is inherently political; it’s not something you should shy away from,” said Ms. Sieber, who studies the use of data by citizen groups. “Governments need to be all about fairness.” If city government were concerned only with efficiency, she said, “you don’t send buses where it’s rural or poor.”
Get back to us when you've got jet packs and flying cars.
Even non-flying, self-driving cars are proving more of a challenge than expected. in reviewing a Wired article on the over-hyping of the technology, Yves Smith writes at Naked Capitalism:
The big problem is that the people engineering these systems have yet to come close to mastering basic design requirements. They think they know how to get there, but that is sort of like being able to describe what it would take to sail across the Pacific solo and actually doing it.
Because the sensors needed are not up to the operating requirements, Smith writes, designers are using "fudges":
The self driving car proponents are also bizarrely eager to introduce a less than fully autonomous car, presumably to increase customer acceptance, when it is likely to backfire. The fudge is to have a human at ready to take over the car in case it asks for help.
First, as one might infer, the human who is suddenly asked to intervene is going to have to quickly asses the situation. The handoff delay means a slower response than if a human had been driving the entire time. Second, and even worse, the human suddenly asked to take control might not even see what the emergency need is. Third, the car itself might not recognize that it is about to get into trouble. Recall that Uber tried to blame a car accident when its self driving car was making a left turn on the oncoming driver, when if you parsed the story carefully, it was the Uber car that was in the wrong.
The newest iteration of the “human takeover” fudge is to have remotely located humans take over navigating the car. Help me. Unlike a driver in a vehicle, they won’t have any feel for the setting. That means an even slower reaction in what will typically be an emergency situation. This is a prescription for bad outcomes, meaning a much worse safety record than with people as drivers, fatally undermining a key claim for self driving cars, that they’d be safer than human operated ones.
I once heard because of the vehicles' inherent instability, it was impossible for pilots to switch seats in an airborne helicopter. This sounds just as dicey.
But even dicier is entrusting technology companies with our privacy and democracy. We can't even trust them not to slow down our phones without telling us.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
