Is being “smarter” always good?

Everybody would like to live in a smarter city. In recent years, technology has been celebrated as a way of solving old problems in a cheaper and better (thus smarter) way, making cities “smart”. However, with new concepts, new caveats appear, creating the possibility of the “smarter” version of the city becoming worse than its previous one. For example, a system failure could stop a city from functioning altogether, or someone with a malicious intent could attack a city using its “smart” capabilities as a port of entry.

This could occur because although the type and supplier of this new technology are really diverse, their core functions the same way: information flowing from sensors or typed in some computer into a set of codes that will process it all and spit reports or commands. The platform where all of these happen is usually the internet or some kind of internal network, and both of these are vulnerable to attacks. Guessable default passwords or bugs that could allow an attacker to inject malicious software are some of the examples a research recently found while studying this problem. [1]

Undoubtedly, smarter cities are better than “non-smart” ones. However, we should always be aware that when we are walking into the unknown, it is smart to do it carefully. It is not smart to rely entirely on systems that can be vulnerable. It is smart, though, to mix well-established techniques with new ones until we know the risks and precautions we have to take so we don’t put the city in danger.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/sensor-hubs-smart-cities-vulnerabilities-hacks/