Here’s the last part of our interview with Nigel Jacob, for our “Meet our Scientific Committee” series.
Nigel Jacob is the co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic innovation incubator and research and development lab within Boston City Hall. He was also an Urban Technologist in Residence at Living Cities, a philanthropic collaboration of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, is currently a board member of organizations such as Code For America and coUrbanize, and is an executive in residence. at Boston University.
Last year you worked with Helpful Places on DTPR, an open-source communication standard that aims to enable transparency, accountability, and control for people. Could you tell us more about this project?
Like much of the rest of the world, we were watching very closely as Google and Sidewalk Labs took on this big project in Toronto, a huge project to create a new neighbourhood in Toronto in the waterfront district. I honestly think they gave it a good effort. They tried a lot of different things and also realised the importance of having the support of the community so they did lots of different things to engage the community in talking about technology, privacy and community, etc. One of the things that they began to explore was the idea that when you start placing devices into the public realm there is the question of how you notify people about what is going on. We have never really done this very well in cities anyway. There are already a lot of devices on streetlights and walls that people can identify, the weird dark cameras that are police‑owned, transportation-owned, who knows. In this case, since these next-generation devices that Cyberpunk would be deployed would be gathering a lot of next-levels of vision or detailed information, they knew that they needed to do something more. They began to develop this idea of digital transparency in the public realm, DTPR, and the thought is that there should have an easy way for people to understand what devices are in a particular public space if they are gathering information for traffic, sniffing Bluetooth or whatever. They put together a pretty good design team that will look at these issues and what the DTPR would look like for devices to be able to scrape information from a particular area, etc.
After the project shutdown, the DTPR team split off into a separate non-profit company and they have continued to explore this work. I think it is a fascinating idea and a foundational one for how we think about cities and technologies because the way that we notify the public and other devices about what is built into the physical environment is an important idea. The notion with all these systems is not to create a surveillance society and so there has to be a way to enable people to make smart decisions about what they are and are not willing to trade-off. You could imagine you walking into a public space with your phone and it tells you that there are devices within this region. Maybe there is a short sign off if it is asking, you can imagine, to gather certain information from you but also trade information or maybe give information back to you about what has been gathered. You can look at it and think it is a good thing. They want to know maybe age or destination and in place, they will give me information about speed, safety, or something. We were able to work with the DTPR start-up to explore Boston. We did the low-tech version, which is basically stickers on light poles giving information about surrounding devices. I think it is an interesting idea I will definitely be continuing to explore in Boston.
Do you already have some results from this experiment?
I think one of the things was that not a lot of people were accessing the information. Some people did, a lot of people did not, which is both interesting- It is one of those things where people are comfortable ignoring these kinds of things but presumably at some point there will be a threshold moment where there are a lot of devices in the public right of way, so people will no longer be able to ignore them. I think that it is one of these things that is exploring the edges of how humans interact with the built environment. It was already an interesting area before digital technology. We have done a lot of work using 311, which is a standard for gathering and reporting information about the built environment for things that need fixing, broken streetlights, graffiti, etc. Some people do this naturally and there is an app that you can use not only here but in a lot of places and if you see something that needs to be fixed you start up the app and send your location information, etc. Some people do this in large numbers and will do it several times a day, maybe not every day but often several times a day and some people do not do it at all. The question of why some people do and some do not engage in this sort of behaviours is a really interesting research question in itself and one can imagine as devices proliferate in the built environment this will increasingly become an issue in terms of how people understand what is going on in the built environment.
In a TEDx you noted that civic discourse is broken. Why is it broken and how can we change this ?
I do not know if it is broken, I think that some people just engage more. It also depends on what we mean by discourse because civic covers a lot of territory. In a general sense, I think- It is a very complicated question but part of it is people’s expectations of government. If your expectation of government is that it will be responsive and you tell it that something is wrong or broken that somebody will respond or fix that thing. If your experience of government is very different and that they will target you if you tell them something is wrong, then you are not going to do that. Part of this is about trust, awareness and about culture. There are different cultures and different countries around the world, different cities, where there are completely different cultures in terms of how people interact with the government. It is not to say that civic discourse only happens between residents and government, there is also a lot of peer-to-peer discussions as well, but part of that is about government. There is a lot of work to be done and some of this work is happening in terms of using these kinds of systems to change or augment your civic behaviour.
There are a lot of interesting things happening on this. It used to be a social science concept known as the “broken windows theory”, this notion that if there is a lot of what we used to call quality of life issues in a built environment like litter on the ground or broken windows, nothing life-threatening or dangerous but in general it looks ugly or in disarray, then those things actually create a cultural and social context where people can do more serious crimes. The idea was that a lot of litter encourages people to steal and it was like a back of the envelope social science theory from the nineties. It turns out that it depends on a lot of different characteristics. It depends on all those things, local culture, local history as far as support from the government, etc., so there is a lot to be learned there.
In the same TEDx you also said that we could use tech to build compassion. Could you explain a bit more on this idea?
If we are in an American context, compassion and empathy are serious considerations. A higher degree of compassion and empathy means that a community dialogue will not be as acrimonious as it would be otherwise. When there is no sense of compassion or empathy for one’s neighbours or even people you do not know, maybe other people in the city, it becomes very easy to think of them as somehow less than you or less deserving than you.
I think that when they are well-designed, technology can absolutely improve people’s sense of compassion and empathy towards one another. When you think about the digital games and how far they have come, there are all these interesting opportunities to explore that and it can work across ages, cultures, etc.
Imagine once Augmented Reality starts making its way into the built environment in deeper more sophisticated ways, that will change how people interact with the built environment and each other. Or once AI starts making its way into part of the discourse, I think that will enrich things. Imagine a scenario where people are talking about a historical topic regarding developments, maybe it is about the history of environmental justice in this particular area. What often derails conversations is our incorrect facts; somebody says that 30 000 people were displaced from this place when it was actually 300. You can imagine something as simple as a fact-checking system that is engaged in the dialogue and that can actually pump that up in a window that says that it was actually 300 people that could change the nature of dialogue or inform the dialogue. I think exploring technology’s influence on all these kinds of social situations is really exciting.
You mentioned Augmented Reality, do you have another scenario in mind for how AR could empower our interaction with the built environment?
In this country and I am sure in all countries, there are deep historical sources of trauma. When you think about the violence done against indigenous people in order to get this land, that we are sitting on, or the violence done to enslaved Africans, or women demonstrating in the sixties. Understanding the historical context of public spaces enriches our experience. You go from a place being just a bunch of buildings that may or may not be well-designed, but then also you see the history of struggle and people fought to get this land cleared, etc. I am really interested in this future where people could understand and see how things have happened in their city and the spaces that they inhabit.
I think it can give people new sources of insight into the built environment. If you think about the whole idea of natural resources. I remember talking to a friend of mine and he was talking about the importance of understanding the water resources in our community, where it comes from, where the wastewater goes, what happens during a storm. Imagine that being overlaid in some way as you are moving around the space so that you can see that this is likely to overflow the cistern, which will cause down street flooding, which will then eventually cause mosquito blooms, etc. I think there is a lot you can find out in different ways but to make it contextual in the moment will be really interesting and it will be as much art as it is science. It is about being able to find the right visualisations that encourage compassion and empathy. It will be part of the work of designers doing this sort of thing in these spaces.
What posture do American cities have towards Artificial Intelligence?
I think there are a variety of initial reactions. My sense is that as people living in the 21st century we are technophiles to some degree and so we want to say that it is cool. However, after people think about it for a second or two then they say it sounds scary and wonder if we are being monitored. I think the dialogue needs to be enriched because it is never one thing and the other, as we have been talking. I think there is going to have to be deeper discussions about how AI is being deployed. I think the real question is if this is nothing more than a way for either government to get more information about you or for companies to make money from you, that does not sound good to anybody. That seems like a dystopian future.
However, one of the standard problems we often see in American cities is the challenge of referrals. Supposing I show up, I am a single mother who does not speak English as her first language and I need access to services and maybe I am here undocumented. I have a young child I cannot get into school because we are undocumented so I need help, probably help with food and healthcare for the whole family. There are human services that exist and the challenge is getting that person to those services. If you know the services are there you can just go and ask for them but if you do not, and most people do not and most agencies do not, then the issue is that we have this weird unused, untapped, resource problem. That is an AI problem in my mind. When you look at people with needs and all sorts of reasons for that, it is a question of how you make that match in an intelligent way. I think there are a lot of ways in which AI could be used to improve the way things work, I think we just need some inspiration in thinking about what those ways are. It is not only about surveillance capitalism, I think there are other ways of enriching the dialogue with AI.
Last question : for you, what is the most promising field of application for urban Artificial Intelligence.
I think there is something about human services, getting the right services to people in need, that is a huge one. It has not had a lot of attention from researchers or practitioners so I encourage you all to take a look at that and stop it.
It seems to me that anytime there is complexity, AI can presumably have a part to play.
