About three years ago, I tried to describe some of the differences between expectations based on a rosy view of the future and realities based on…reality: The Star Trek Fallacies. Since that blog post, a new idea has come along that runs headlong into the fallacies about control, reliability, and repairability that I had described. That idea is the “smart city,” which from any perspective can best be described as taking the smart home concept of app-controlled appliances and applying it at the urban scale.
There are a number of reasons that I think that the smart city is both a terrible idea and doomed. Fortunately, I don’t have to described them all because Dr. Shoshanna Saxe has already done it: “I’m an Engineer, and I’m Not Buying Into ‘Smart’ Cities.” I agree with everything she says but would extrapolate a bit further. First, the repeated discussions of internet privacy and how large tech companies handle personal data (not to mention the fact that I keep seeing people put sticky notes to block their pc’s built in cameras to prevent spying) make me wonder how privacy concerns can be addressed once data collections moves from apps to urban infrastructure. I don’t think it’s anyone’s business when I set foot outside my home, but that will be trackable in a smart city, whether or not it is supposedly being tracked.
Working in the renovation and restoration field, I have become intimately familiar with the failure of brick, wood, concrete, and steel. These are simple, strong, and durable materials, and they all degrade when exposed to the weather and unforeseen conditions. How are sensors and motors, which are far more fragile and complex, going to survive? Or to put it another way, are we ready for our every piece of our built environment to have the maintenance requirements of modern cars?
The essence of a cargo cult is believing that creating the external appearance of something will bring that thing into existence. The smart city craze seems to fit the bill: if we make physical reality look like, and be monitored like, a virtual-reality environment, then surely we will have control over it just as we do virtual environments. Meanwhile, the reality is the self-driving cars are so bad at handling unscripted reality that they can be trapped by salt circles.
