Privacy and trust in artificially intelligent cities

The notion of a “smart” city has too often been reduced to the use of technology to automate processes toward more efficiency and cost savings in areas such as transportation, public safety, or energy. These are important objectives to be sure, but the most vexing challenges faced by cities and their inhabitants are less obviously amenable to purely technical solutions, as these relate to human and societal needs such as for opportunity, fairness, safety, and justice. While cities attempt to manage their operations through smart city solutions, no amount of automation or efficiency will automatically make a city “smart” if these human and societal needs are not integrated with, or ideally driving, those solutions. Moreover, a focus on technological systems introduces at least two hidden dangers. First, managing complex technological systems requires controlling and monitoring those systems, leading to concepts such as an “operating system” for the city and a trend from automation to autonomous systems. This is partly fueled by increasing capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), in turn enabling ever more sophisticated autonomous systems. But operating systems are, predominantly, authoritarian systems and AI capabilities, while extraordinarily useful for many mechanical and mathematical functions, have yet to overcome critical challenges such as bias and judgment, much less understanding human concepts of opportunity or fairness. Second, new technologies introduce new capabilities not yet contemplated by society or governance structures and the potential for derivative capabilities that may not have been anticipated even by the system designers themselves. Thus, these new capabilities operate not only absent appropriate policy but in advance of a clear concept of what those appropriate policies should be! We discuss these challenges in the context of real-world smart city deployments, the impact of such technologies on assumptions about the relationship between democratic government and public spaces, and strategies for addressing them not only for today’s smart city trends but in a generalized fashion anticipating tomorrow’s smart city systems.