
An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities - imwally
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-inconvenient-truth-about-smart-cities/#
======
jesperlang
We are a culture obsessed by the _how_ , not the _why_. A picture of people
walking or biking to work does not fit our idea of the "future" as well as one
where we ride around in slick glass pods. We have grown custom to doing even
the simplest things orders of magnitude less efficient than they need to be.

We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at
the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am
I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live?
What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?

Cities are complex adaptive _social_ systems that we are nowhere near fully
understanding. Formulating a vision of a city with its base in a technological
ideal ("smart") just shows how disconnected you are from reality and how setup
you will be for complete failure.

~~~
panic
_> We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image
at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts,
am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live?
What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?_

Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of _The Death and
Life of Great American Cities_. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole
book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance):

-

 _When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and
intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can
be done with cities._ A city cannot be a work of art.

 _We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of
life, to help explain life to us, to show us meaning, to illuminate the
relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside
us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However,
although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion
between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It
is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up
this confusion._

 _Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists,
whatever their medium,_ make selections _from the abounding materials of life,
and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the
artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e.,
of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous
result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control
are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process
is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity_ from _life. In relation to
the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is
arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its
own kind of order and coherence._

 _To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger
architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a
disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute
art for life._

 _The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life
nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and
decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are
exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities._

~~~
bogomipz
>"Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of The Death and
Life of Great American Cities. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole
book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance)"

That's a seminal book in urban planning and policy. I was happy to see it
mentioned in the discussion. There was also a good documentary of Jane Jacobes
that was released last year(she would have 100) called "Citizen Jane: Battle
for the City"

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3699354/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3699354/)

~~~
ghaff
Cool. I will have to check that out.

Urban planning is complex. One can simultaneously be aghast at some of the
worst excesses of Robert Moses' highway visions and mum on the impact of, say,
Lincoln Center on the then-existing neighborhoods.

And, as I alluded to in another comment, an organic/livable city doesn't
necessarily equate to one that's as inexpensive to live in as potential
inhabitants would like it to be.

------
b0rsuk
Ancient Greeks famously started new cities with a... city square, and built
around it. This is because public matters were most important to them and
focusing on private matters was the definition of egoism and a bad citizen.

Whenever I hear about another smart city project, it seems to be done for
show. There are pictures of architecture, vegetation, various mechanical
systems or circuits. As if people living there didn't matter. Everyone will
fit in and it will be great because concrete will do the thinking for you.

~~~
jsemrau
But we are not living in 2000 BC anymore. Public matters can be solved in
distributed ways since the 1990s via public websites. What is happening right
now is a much more fundamental change in the way cities operate.

1\. The third social space (restaurants, cafe's, etc) becomes more and more
irrelevant due to delivery services. So you can enjoy restaurant food within
the comfort of your home. As a result urban space used for restaurants will
likely decrease.

2\. Retail is dying for a long while. Currently 10.3% of urban retail space in
Singapore (where I live) is not used. Tendency increasing. The only thing
working against the trend are co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.

We have to come to terms that instead of building cities for cars we need to
build cities for mobile humans with a cellphone.

~~~
b0rsuk
Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it's a pity.
Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave
labor in nearby silver mines and regularly voted to declare wars on other
peoples. But some solutions were thought-provoking.

By moving public matters to a website you move them out of sight. Out of
sight, out of mind. People think less of common good, and how the city should
work. Public matters become distant, abstract and impersonal.

Many people value restaurant not exclusively for the food - which can be a bit
stale or cold if it's delivered to you - but also for the service, pleasant
atmosphere and sometimes to meet interesting people. And to show off.

I don't know how it works in Singapore, but in a traditional shop you can
examine goods you'd like to purchase, try them on, ask questions, or even
negotiate a little bit. In my country it's rare that a shop's website has
accurate and complete descriptions for all items, or even photos from all
sides. A shop may have a contact form or a person answering questions through
instant messages, but you can't know if he/she is active and not on a coffee
break. To make a perfect shop website you have to make special cases to
emulate many kinds of service that you take for granted entering a physical
shop.

Delivery works well for easily defined items like books that don't have many
variants, such as books, and even then if you know precisely which book do you
want. A recommendation system might or might not give you valuable
suggestions. In a shop or library, you can browse a book or ask the librarian
or clerk.

In some ways, delivery shops and shops in general are very inefficient. For
example if you buy physical books, everyone must have their own book, whereas
in a library one copy can be used by many people. In some ways it's much more
efficient. Digital books are even more efficient, but publishers fight very
hard to create artificial scarcity and disallow copying, which is next to free
in cost.

But a digital version of a soldering iron, a hammer or climbing equipment
won't suffice, and this could be handled similar to a library, even for a fee.
These items are only needed occasionally in most homes - if you run your own
workshop, it's another story.

~~~
coldtea
> _Maybe it works like that in Singapore. Personally, I think it 's a pity.
> Ancient Greece was far from an utopia - even "enlighted" Athens used slave
> labor in nearby silver mines_

Considering that the US didn't allow poor people to vote until the mid 19th
century (which ancient Athens allowed), didn't allow blacks to vote until much
later, and women to vote until 1920s, and it still had slavery until 1860s --
that is, 2 and a half millennia after those ancient Athenians, I'd say they
were quite ahead of the time in their democracy.

~~~
b0rsuk
We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel words
because I don't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE can vote
is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system, two idiots
are worth more than a genius. People living under a rock, not knowing what's
going on in the neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much.
How to deal with that ?

One way is by restricting who gets to vote. Should clinically insane people be
allowed to vote ? How about criminals ? But where to draw the line ? Another
is similar - some wise people would get more votes. Third way - provide decent
free education to everyone. It has been achieved on a small scale (Finland),
in fact Finnish education is much more than that.

I'm sympathetic to the Karl Popper's definition of democracy:

 _It is wrong to ask who will rule. The ability to vote a bad government out
of office is enough. That is democracy._

and

 _I personally call the type of government which can be removed without
violence 'democracy,' and the other, 'tyranny.'._

also

 _Democracy cannot be fully characterized as the rule of the majority,
although the institution of general elections is most important. For a
majority might rule in a tyrannical way. (The majority of those who are less
than 6 ft. high may decide that the minority of those over 6 ft. shall pay all
taxes.) In a democracy, the powers of the rulers must be limited;_

~~~
coldtea
> _We agree on women and blacks. But good arguments have been made (weasel
> words because I don 't remember the source) that a democracy where EVERYONE
> can vote is very susceptible to populism and demagogy. Under this system,
> two idiots are worth more than a genius._

The idea behind democracy, at least real athenian democracy, is that it
doesn't matter who is an idiot and who is a genius.

Not just because they are all people, but mainly because since they are all to
be affected by the decisions of a vote, they should all have a say.

If anything, when one was "too much of a genius" or too distinct from others,
it was viewed with suspicion, and they could see themselves ostracised (with
"ostraca" being the ancient greek word for sea-shells, but also the shards of
pottery using for voting, upon which athenians wrote the names of people to
exile from the city) [1].

(And come to think of it, some of the most disastrous, self serving, society
destructing, laws and ideas, come not from "idiots" but for very clever and
well educated people).

So democracy is not about "finding what's best". It's about people
participating in it, whether their thinking (or lack thereof), having equal
say on what should be done in their community.

That's why ancient athenians besides mass popular vote, they also gave some
high official positions by lottery -- so anybody, at random, can get a chance
to get to them (for a term).

> _People living under a rock, not knowing what 's going on in the
> neighborhood, let alone the country, are worth just as much. How to deal
> with that ?_

Accept it.

[1] Aristedes a.k.a. "Aristedes the just" was a renowned state-person, who
everybody considered trustworthy and just (hence the nickname), and he had
done much to prove himself so over the years. (...). Once, when there was a
vote for ostacizing, (...) it is said that an illiterate voter who did not
recognise Aristides approached the statesman and requested that he write the
name of Aristides on his voting shard to ostracize him. The latter asked if
Aristides had wronged him. "No," was the reply, "and I do not even know him,
but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called 'the Just'." Aristides then
wrote his own name on the ballot.

~~~
b0rsuk
But the Founding Fathers were more inspired by Sparta than Athens (source:
documentary by History Channel). Sparta had not just a constitution and
voting, but also a couple of institutions:

    
    
      *  two kings (equivalent of president)
      * apella (public voting for males over 30...)
      * ephors (ministers)
      * gerusia (elders... so senate ? In practice they held the most power and Sparta was an oligarchy)
    

Remember that Athenians voted to sentence Socrates to death. Philosophers
delighted in trolling, and Socrates specialized in inconvenient questions.
Soon they regretted that because they needed his advice. But it was too late.

* * *

The issue is not that the decisions aren't perfect. Ignorant people are
disturbingly easy to manipulate into voting. Stupid people can be outright
dangerous. I think Carlo M. Cipolla argued it best: from social perspective, a
stupid person is a person who causes harm to you while not getting any benefit
for it or even getting hurt himself in the process.

Maybe (instead of age requirement?) there should be some kind of "public
affairs" test based on knowledge of what happened in the last few years ?
Something like that.

~~~
jamiek88
Then you end up back at Jim Crow laws. Look at how much ‘voting fraud’ is
being used in certain states to apply conditions to voting and how it affects
turnout.

There is just no good way to do such tests in a fully enfranchised democracy.
It’s like parent tests or licenses people occasionally think of, ive thought
it myself ‘no way should that scumbag be allowed to breed’ when reading about
terrible abuse etc., but again those rules can and will end up applied to
social undesirables and who decides that?

Rosa Parks was socially undesirable.

------
foobar1962
Back in the day when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft and was hitting the big
money, I remember hearing about his building a huge $5M house (when a million
dollars was a million dollars) that would have digital-everything and be 100%
buzzword compatible. This was probably the 1990s.

I'm wondering 1) how it went then; and 2) is the house now obsolete after just
20 years?

A house being obsolete in 20 years is one thing, but a whole city being
obsolete is quite another.

~~~
mtgx
Not just obsolete. Think about all the security issues appearing only 5 years
later. I sure hope all "smart city solution vendors" are _required_ to provide
_lifetime updates_ , and there's also a mechanism to switch the maintenance of
those products to some other company if the original companies go under. It
shouldn't be like "Hey, so now we'll go bankrupt. Good luck with our DRMed
proprietary products, though!"

This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source
solutions as much as possible _despite_ the "high-cost of switching and
training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our
institutions in the future. And it's going to be _way_ more expensive to solve
issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.

~~~
Roritharr
To be the contrarian on the subject: this is also already the case with
machinery. If the company i bought the water heater from goes bankrupt,
there's no way to get spareparts and i have to replace the thing once one
plastic nubbin breaks. Not much different if there's no one there to patch its
openssl version.

~~~
foobar1962
If we wanted to make a low-maintenance, low-energy city, we'd use the LOWEST
technology possible to get the job done. Round-a-bouts, not "smart traffic
lights".

My personal view is that to see the cities of our near future, go to
practically any big city in Asia today. High population density, everybody
(whole families and and their farm animals) racing about on small motor
scooters. Not a bad standard of living, but nothing like what we in thew west
are used to (I'm in Australia).

Segways and flying cars are too expensive to make, too hard to fix, and too
expensive to run. Ditto for maglev trains running in vacuum tunnels under
cities.

~~~
tialaramex
As someone who loves in an area with both, traffic lights and roundabouts are
very different and solve different problems. One critical thing lights offer
is you can drop in a pedestrian crossing sequenced to the lights. These days
you would use puffin crossings (sensors check the crossing is clear of
pedestrians before giving signals back to motor traffic, also the cross/don't
cross indication is mounted where pedestrians looking at it are also facing
the nearest lane of motor traffic, increasing safety). On the other hand
roundabouts are great for junctions where a lot of traffic enters the junction
but most doesn't conflict.

In some scenarios it makes sense to have both lights and roundabouts, in
extreme cases it even makes sense to fit roundabouts on a circle of
roundabouts which then have lights at peak times.

------
js8
The inconvenient truth about anything smart is that it actually takes a lot of
caring and feeding from very few experts (expensive) who actually understand
the technology.

The end result is that economic laws put practical limit on what you can
achieve with smart. The smart aspect of things needs to generate enough
savings for the economic entity to be able to muster the experts to fix
things, as they inevitably break in various ways. And it only happens if the
entity is large enough.

Every, say, home could be made smarter, and the total savings would be
probably big. But we won't do that as individuals, because for each of us, the
cost of the expert is scary compared to the tiny savings that we can
individually achieve with it. If we would organize (that is, create a larger
economic entity), then perhaps it would be possible. But organization causes
additional costs, too.

~~~
christophilus
The smartest things I own are not digital at all. My plain old mechanical
garden tools, my hammer, saw, mechanical kitchen equipment handed down to me
from Grandma... The dumb things I have are all digital. They're finicky.
They're unintuitive. They break in a few years, and it's almost always the
electronics that are to blame.

My dad spent his career as a general manager in manufacturing. He had some
machines that were over 100 years old, still running like a champ. The newer
ones caused nothing but headaches (but did run more efficiently when they were
working). When someone came to him with a problem, the root of it was almost
always TMDE (Too Much Damn Electronics). I used to make fun of him for being a
stodgy old fart...

But after spending ~20 years as a software engineer, I'm beginning to think he
was right.

~~~
skadamou
Sometimes I think that the Hacker News crowd overlooks how terribly fussy tech
can be. For those with technical literacy, spare time, and a genuine interest
in electronics, figuring out how to get their <insert smart device here>
working again probably isn't that big of a deal. However, if you are not this
person, you are probably better off sticking with the analog version. At least
for now.

~~~
achamayou
There's mostly no way you're going to fix recent compact electronics with
integrated SoC and fused screens at home. It would require absurdly
sophisticated tooling, and would make no financial sense at all. Virtually
nothing on sale these days has components far apart enough on the board for
you to replace with a basic soldering iron. Not that the trend towards gluing
everything together would let you access the boards easily in the first place.

------
tonyedgecombe
The inconvenient truth about existing cities is we have let them become
completely dominated by technology, in particular the car.

------
Heliosmaster
I'm not sure about either the skepticism or the enthusiasm: we have,
throughout history, built cities according to the "modern" standard. From the
greek squares, to medieval towns with only space for a small handcart, to the
car-centric cities in the US. And as we go, we improve them based on our
knowledge: will we get it "right" this time? Of course not! But that's not the
purpose of these projects. Can we try, see what comes out, and adjust as
necessary?

Putting all these posts beforehand sounds to me like waterfall development,
where cities are naturally built in an "agile" way. See Rome, for example :)

~~~
jpm_sd
Ah, but Rome was not built in a sprint!

I think the main point is that fancy IoT gadgetry counts for very little
compared to the things that really make a city work: infrastructure for power,
water, sanitation, and transportation; places for people to live, not for
gadgets to watch them.

~~~
ddalex
> Rome was not built in a sprint!

Now I have to have this T-Shirt to wear to sprint planning meetings.

------
xvilka
It is not only about connectivity. The smarter city becomes, the more question
of privacy arise. While it shouldn't be a stopper for further digitalization,
cross-integration and overall efficiency tuning, putting it in the recipe
should be done right now. I like the solution by Hannu Rajaniemi in his
masterpiece Quantum Thief: every citizen in City of Mars had a complex
"gevulot" (a complex set of a keychains, like in PKI), where he can decides
what to share, with whom and for what time. There were news from Canada about
designing similar system for national ID and other important documents. But
the part of online-selection every time what to share is important in my
opinion. We'll see what future will make of that.

~~~
magicalswami
Can you tell me more about this device? I'd love a link. I'm writing a story
on exactly this issue.

------
willvarfar
I like Swedish cities because they are low-rise and had more trees, squares
(usually triangles) and pedestrians. I particularly recall a wide tree-lined
car-free avenue acting as a buffer zone between two parts of Malmö; people
would take nice park walks in this elongated park just a few meters wide. I
remember wishing that avenues like that radiated like spokes from the center
so I could have had such a walk or cycle ride to work daily.

~~~
null_object
Sweden’s city model hardly represents the ideal: the 1960s thru 1980s
intentionally ripped the public center out of almost all Swedish towns,
discouraging outside public space and attempting to make city and town centers
into purely work and centralized (mostly indoor) retail spaces, with large
(often multi-storey) parking spaces to enable easy car-transport to and from
the suburbs (where people were supposed to live).

Take a look at the center of Stockholm: the area past the old town connecting
the southern, central and western islands (Söder, Norrmalm/City, Kungsholmen)
is a horrific spaghetti of motorways leading right into the heart of town -
impossible to navigate on foot (pedestrians are led under overpasses, through
tunnels, up and down litter-strewn stairways, and past 'unofficial’ toilets.
It’s a truly dystopian vision of what can happen to a town when city-planners
decide that cities are not for living in, and only local activism and
historical accident preserved the parts of the old town that tourists now
think are so beautiful and charming.

Nowadays things are improving, but the center of the city itself is still
largely pedestrian and cycle-unfriendly, and many central streets have no
doors, windows or stores facing the street itself: the idea was to keep the
sidewalks free from people loitering or strolling around.

If you want a human-scaled model of a city that’s built to encourage public
space, walking and meeting, then almost any southern European town that’s
built to radiate from a central (traffic-free) square, ringed by restaurants
and cafés, is a better example than anywhere in Sweden.

~~~
ptr
This comment makes me wonder if we’ve been to the same city, a horrific
spaghetti of motorways? “Truly dystopian”? And which city planners are you
talking about, Fleming in the 1600s or Lindhagen in the 1800s? The problem
with Stockholm is that it is situated on a bunch of islands, making bridges
and tunnels necessary.

~~~
null_object
I don't want to get sidetracked into our subjective impressions of Stockholm,
but for the record, I live and work in the center of the town, and my
preferred means of getting around would ideally be cycling and walking -
neither of which are directly encouraged by the fact that during the 1960s to
the 1980s large areas of the center were demolished and replaced by an
extensive network of motorways and wide feeder roads directly into the city
center. If you take a look at the google maps link [1] you can see the central
train station over the horizon of multi-lane motorways, and looking around the
panorama you should be able to get an impression of the massive network built
for cars around the entire central area.

These roads don't connect the 'bunch of islands' (which are all linked by
quite short bridges) they were intended to transport people living in the
suburbs to their jobs in an otherwise uninhabited town, and back again in the
evening, travelling by car. Trying to cross this network from the city-center
to the neighboring island (Kungsholmen) involves the sort of dystopian walk I
described above. Naturally there are other ways to get from one island to the
other that circumvent this mammoth road network.

The center of Stockholm was viewed as unmodern and slum-like in the 1960s, and
the planners at that time intended to completely remove all of the buildings
and streets that you refer to: they were prevented from totally razing the Old
Town (Gamla Stan) by local activists and protests, but large areas of the City
were demolished and replaced by faceless office-space, with no entrances,
shops, cafés or any features that would encourage people to do anything than
walk or drive past as fast as possible on their way elsewhere.

These streets [2] have only begun to be 'humanized' in recent years, now that
planners have seen the error of attempting to empty the city-center of all
people before and after work hours - and now the process of establishing
restaurants, hotels, cafés, shops and other lively street activities is really
in full swing, with construction across almost all the streets listed in the
note below.

But the attitude that car-traffic comes first is hard to shake for a
generation of planners brought up with the feeling that masses of cars is a
sign of a 'big city' and of 'city pulse' (stadspuls), so cycle lanes are
generally rubbish [3] and pedestrians' needs are generally subsumed under the
requirement to keep car-traffic moving (framkomlighet). Although much lip-
service is now paid to cycling and walking in towns, very little is done
outside of the tourist-visible areas in the center.

[1] [https://goo.gl/4sWntM](https://goo.gl/4sWntM) [2] For example:
Vattugatan, Malmskillnadsgatan, Herkulesgatan, Mäster Samuelsgatan [3]
[https://goo.gl/JfWRtU](https://goo.gl/JfWRtU)

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
I'm not from Sweden but from Spain, but here the trend in many cities
(including mine) during the 60s and the 70s was the same as you describe,
including awful crimes against cultural heritage. Wonderful "art nouveau"
buildings were demolished to make room for asphalt and soulless cubes of
concrete.

I often wonder what they were smoking in those decades to see such things as
normal. I can understand that they thought that the car was the future, seeing
all the convenience and not being aware of the full importance of the
drawbacks (congestion, pollution, unhealthy lifestyle, etc.), but couldn't
they at least have some appreciation of beauty?

Atlantic Hotel, A Coruña, opened in 1923, demolished in 1967:
[https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/99/92/569992a08191d5af0593...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/56/99/92/569992a08191d5af05933cdf5aa17849.jpg)

The new hotel taking its place from 1968: [https://media-
cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/64/ac/17/...](https://media-
cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/04/64/ac/17/nh-atlantico.jpg)

Just one among many examples that give one the urge to reach for a time
machine and an axe...

~~~
ddalex
My first take is the maintenance cost. When labour is plentiful and cheap, you
can have teams of cleaners to meticulously brush each corner in the intricate
rooms, corridors and decorations of an Art Nouveau building.

When the cost with the labour force rises, you need to clean with fewer
people, and faster. You need to use larger tools to cover the same area
faster, and the tools require simple large shapes where, a vacuum for e.g. can
easily go in any corner - hence a cube. Add the need to build fast and cheap,
so concrete is it, or, after technology advances, just metal, glass and
drywall - who has time to wait for the concrete to set? - so you end up with
utilitarian cubes of cheap materials.

------
mamon
To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced smart city is
indistinguishable from prison.

------
jdonaldson
There's been numerous attempts at "smart" cities, even in Arizona. One example
is Arcosanti:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti)

These things always sound amazing on paper. But they're always a bit lacking
in person.

------
keganunderwood
If one person owns all the land, they (or someone they authorize) can boot
anyone unwelcome. This makes life much simpler because you can sidestep a lot
of issues and focus on what this really is: a pilot project.

~~~
elygre
Didn’t Disney build such a city in Florida?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Celebration:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida)

A bit like Seahaven Island from the Truman show.

~~~
yardie
Which is another planned town in Florida, Seaside:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida)

------
nautilus12
Whats the issue here. I think its implicitly obvious what style of government
and particularly political affiliation these cities will have based upon who's
starting them. If you think there's a chance that they will take anything from
the playbook on the other side of the aisle, you are sorely mistaken. :P

------
baxtr
Reminds me of the smart home, which I’m still waiting for

~~~
ghaff
Even when things work as designed (which they often don't), the problem with
most Smart Home gadgetry is that they solve problems that I don't have like
flipping the light switch and don't solve things I'd like done for me like
cleaning up the kitchen. The interfaces to electrical equipment is the easy
part. The hard part is the interfaces to physical objects and Smart Home stuff
does nothing about that.

~~~
baxtr
That’s exactly what I think

------
known
Getto for the elite?

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notyourday
Yes, the current system is sooo much better. After all, it supports existence
of Kendra L. Smith, the associate director of community engagement in the
Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford University its the lifestyle
Kendra L. Smith is accustomed to.

