You've read about cities installing smart parking meters and noise- and air-quality sensors, but are you ready to embrace the idea of a city brain?
The residents of Singapore are on track to do just that.
Creating a centralized dashboard view of sensors deployed across a distributed network is nothing new, but it takes on a bigger -- perhaps ominous -- meaning when deployed across a major city.
Many technologically advanced cities worldwide are exploring ways to build such comprehensive digital views for managing traffic and parking, monitoring water and air quality, and offering such citizen-facing services as web-based tools for interacting with government agencies. Some smart city experts call this system approach a "city brain" or, less glamorously, a "municipal backplane."
Such a setup could be used as a "command and control" center for city infrastructure or as a better way to manage data across disparate agencies and make planning decisions. A municipality, for example, could use aggregated data from sensors to justify a subway expansion or other long-term infrastructure improvements in a 10-year or even a 50-year planning pipeline.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:23AM
The trouble faced by all planned economies until now has been the lack of perfect information about the state of supply and demand. With sensors everywhere recording everything, finally there will be enough information to decide with certainty how much sex lube to produce and exactly whose holes want filling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:39AM
Psycho-Pass!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @08:59AM
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This is the place that a decade or more ago started requiring ID cards for public transit and other checkpoints. They have one of the most comprehensive hate speech laws on the planet, etc.
Nothing about Singapore has, nor ever probably WILL involve privacy, or personal liberty.
That said, if it works for them and it makes them a better country, all the more power to them. It is pretty obvious the US, UK, Europe, etc have their own 'needs improvement' issues, many of which seem to be eroding, rather than empowering with every get-together their politicians have.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @11:22AM
That said, if it works for them and it makes them a better country, all the more power to them.
No. If they are sacrificing people's privacy on a massive scale, then that is unethical and they should not be doing so. You should be able to anonymously use public transit and go past checkpoints anonymously as well. We shouldn't cheer on surveillance states by saying things like "all the more power to them". Pretty much every country (the US included) is a surveillance state to some extent now.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Wednesday December 14 2016, @01:47PM
But doesn't consent enter into the ethical conversation? I mean, if you look at Singapore as a place for people to go who are willing to sacrifice that amount of privacy and freedom for stability, then I think it's fair to say "more power to them". More succinctly and on a more concrete personal level, the key distinction between intimacy and a privacy violation is the presence or absence of consent.