On The Road Towards Smart Cities

We find ourselves approaching science fiction at ever-higher speeds, as cities grow ever more intelligent. There will be doomsayers but there are also serious, tangible benefits to living in connected cities

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Imagine a highway that knows you’re travelling on it or a street that knows where you’re going. Imagine shopping in a store without human staff. Imagine never having to own a car because you can just get into an autonomous vehicle at any time and be taken to your destination. Imagine emergency services able to respond to your location because your vital signs have dipped – all without human intervention. That’s the promise of the so-called ‘smart’ city, an interconnected environment designed to change that way that people live, work and interact.

Self-driving cars have their place here, as do the wholly contactless Amazon Go stores that dispense with human staff and use cameras to tell what you’re buying. Apple’s newest Watch, with its ECG and ability to alert emergency services in the States? Or Huawei’s Kirin-based NPUs (neural processing units) currently being turned towards the field of medical diagnostics? Those are also a part of the burgeoning smart city. It’s a bit like a smart home, except those can be constructed by anyone with a set square. A city needs a little more planning, smart cities require considerably more of a runup.

Where to, buddy?

There’s an end-goal in mind for connected cities – they’d be able to account for citizens’ needs, alter themselves in response to weather or natural disaster and confer the most benefit on most of the population in order to succeed. But that sort of technical achievement doesn’t just fall out of the sky – it’s the result of buy-in from all sectors of society, from tech-makers to governments to industry to the average person in the street. And these cities have the potential to make life much simpler.

Living in reality