Béta Citizens; Future cities as Digital labs.
When it comes to global urbanisation, megacities are growing exponentially. Futurologists predict that up to 5 billion people’s lives will be happening in cities by 2030. With an ever-increasing number of people depending on reliable public systems and infrastructures for their daily functions and having the technology at hand, it seems to be a logical move for municipal governments to start looking into automating public service systems to support the smooth-running of everyday life in the metropolis. Automating daily experiences such as public transportation and shopping could present a great opportunity for cities to properly adjust to the projected growth of their population. Some ideas that come to mind with regards to this are self-driving cars and emergency services in the form of delivery drones, as well as check-out free shopping.
Being environments designed to accommodate and support the function of large societal groups by definition, cities undergo continuous changes and development in accordance with the societal needs of the time. In order to be able to plan and offer certain services, information needs to be collected by the service provider or urban planner first. In the current day and age, technology makes it easier than ever before to gather vast quantities of specific information very quickly in the form of digital data. Through mechanisms such as payment cards, heat maps and real-time analytics, it has never been easier for public institutions as well as private companies to source the needed information, allowing them to be able to quickly adapt their service according to the needs of their clients.
The digital transformation of the citizen that is currently happening in cities is focused on providing tailored services to the individual, a phenomenon that is also referred to as hyper-personalisation. Ubiquitous systems are implemented within city perimeters, transferring to the citizen’s fingertips the possibility to request almost any service and make decisions about wants and needs completely independently without referring to another human figure.
It will become a necessity for citizens to take ownership of the values upscaling cities are struggling to uphold.
Think of the number of meditation and health-tracking apps that can be used whenever you feel stressed or decide to start working out, those apps that facilitate connections with other people in your area or the ones aimed at personal security.
What is often forgotten is that these applications are running on capitalist ideals. The majority of these applications are free to use — but always at a cost. The companies that run them make money from advertising, but the real profit is made from gathering information about users’ behaviour. We have collectively become the source for the so-called ‘data exhaust’ — the byproduct of our connected actions, movements and decisions. By using an app, we agree to the terms and conditions, which often involves consenting to the companies owning these applications to monitor and harvest behavioural data.
‘Data-hungry smart cities’ are already an up-and-running concept in existing and new urban development projects. Alphabet has founded Sidewalk Labs, an urban development department aimed at reimagining cities in order to improve quality of life. Quayside, is a pilot project proposing to build a utopian neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront. Sidewalk Labs predicted Quayside as the solution to every major problem in emerging megacities by building the neighbourhood ‘from the internet up’.
The project has been put on hold after local councils raised concerns about the privacy of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants. Meanwhile, similar projects in Asia have already taken off, such as in the case of the brand new ‘smart’ city of New Songdo in South Korea. New Songdo utilises new technologies to solve long-standing problems such as traffic and waste management. ‘Smart’ cities will continue to seek solutions to such problems from the perspective of increased efficiency.
However such technologies are already being implemented on a smaller scale and could be much closer than you think. Surveillance cameras (CCTV) are already using facial recognition to cross-reference against previously collected images and help identify an individual. An example: Dubai Airport has already installed the first facial recognition tunnel aimed at facilitating the process of passing through border security for departing passengers. An advantage of ubiquitous computing is automation that advances information processes and contributes towards making certain services more effective and efficient.
On the other hand, it is important to consider the ways in which such new technology could start being implemented and used without our consent to build systems that lead to increased inequality— consider the creation of virtual precincts inside public venues, commercial enterprises and privatised areas regulated by automated control points. The embedded systems in our city of the (near?) future could start making decisions based on the prejudices of its owners — no technology is neutral. Consider a city that can have a certain bias in relation to certain societal groups? What could be the implications of being the citizen of a city that is technically engineered to exclude you from certain areas or deny some services based on certain criteria?
We as general users, currently lack oversight on the process of such algorithms. We are already hardly in control of how much data and what kind of information is collected about us in exchange for free services and legislation that prevents privatised services from controlling these metropolitan areas lags behind. Citizens often hold politicians responsible for improving their experience of living in the city, asking questions such as, “Why doesn’t my city council prevent this?” “Why isn’t my government stopping this?”
Although our political systems should be addressing rapid technological shifts in society and devising ways of protecting their citizens’ privacy, it is equally important to take action as individuals. Corporations frequently market new technologies under the guises of innovation, keeping up with the trend, increased efficiency and solutionism. However, we as citizens have started questioning, seeing beyond these labels and coming up with counter-measures to excessive data-gathering.
The conflict in the ‘smart’ city is between engineers aiming to improve the accuracy of their algorithms and the citizens denying their effort by removing themselves from the process. In the same sphere as the #DeleteFacebook campaign, users who opt out of the bad product, indirectly also opt out of making the better product. The new digital divide will be between people who are living with an algorithm and people who rebel against it. Should a ‘data-hungry city’ harvest more information than actually needed to improve the lives of the citizen?
The prime example leads the ethics debate of city services converting to automated services. Self-driving cars that can recognize street signs, adjust driving speed based on the neighbourhood and park intelligent without interference in busy streets are currently being developed. There is a very competitive arms race happening of who will release the first self-driving car for the global market. Biometric data will involuntarily be handed over to the vehicles as well as our data exhaust. It is an argument to give up privacy knowing we could improve the system in the long haul. As of now, governments are currently postponing the implementation of self-driving cars by debating the ethical concerns around the ‘Trolley problem’.
An autonomous car can either kill the people on the street or kill the passengers by hitting the roadblock. In this particular example, we wage one adult, male with one child, female and a dog against one adult, female, one child, male and an unborn. If you would like to try answering these dilemmas for yourself, I would highly recommend MIT’s ‘the moral machine’.
The good thing: Your choices reveal more about your personal ethics than the actual consequences. The bad thing: The Trolley problem has always been a trick question. We tend to see the people in and in front of the car as every possible citizen. But the ethnicity of the citizen matters. As a recent(non-published, non-peer reviewed) report, object detection is 5% less accurate with preventing accidents to non-white citizens by autonomous vehicles, due to biased data sets. Mistakes in the city due to automation are an anomaly. As long as accidents or violations do not happen above a certain percentage, companies will remain free to experiment within our communities. When a city is experimenting with ubiquitous computing and automation in their precincts, the citizen will become the test subjects. Future cities will become labs, test grounds for undeveloped products and we will be a variable in the training system. If the city is in béta, our lives are too. We will be béta citizens. As long as we do not create the tools, nor do not create the software, citizens are dependent on companies to give us the freedom to create alternatives in their business plan.
The only utopia will be predictability; a fully automated citizen in a fully automated city.
Should béta citizens start protecting our cities as play labs for bigger corporations? Local city councils have to start to regulate the implementation of technology and big data and work towards technological sovereignty in their cities. Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York City have initiated the ‘Cities Coalition for Digital Rights’, creating five digital rights for citizens:
- Universal and equal access to the internet, and digital literacy
- Privacy, data protection and safety.
- Transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination of data, content and algorithms.
- Participatory Democracy, diversity and inclusion
- Open and ethical digital service standards
Initiatives like these show that we are starting to reinvent how the municipal governments organise their policies. Maybe we should start saying no to companies building cities, neighbourhoods and entertainment areas. There are debates about the implementation of automation on every level in society. But we must remember that one city is not the other, and we should have a policy. Not from our legislators on an EU level, not on our national level, but from our local community; our city.
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