At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world's largest car company, moving it toward becoming a fully fledged mobility company.
Six months ago, after Toyota spent an estimated $10 billion to build an urban paradise atop a disused factory, the first residents moved in.
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The company says it wants to create a "society with zero accidents"—a tall order given the sheer number of Toyotas currently on the road.
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To get there, Absmeier said Toyota's cars will need far more awareness than onboard systems can provide, even with the most advanced lidar, radar, and imaging sensors on the planet. For instance, the only way to spot a kid darting out from behind a truck, he said, is with cameras on every street watching for hazards, paired with warning systems for oncoming traffic.This is part of the age-old promise of vehicle-to-everything communications
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But if the idea of ubiquitous cameras watching everyone gives you pause, you're not alone—it certainly seemed startling to me.
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There are plenty of cameras in urban areas around the world, but I haven't seen anything approaching this level of density. All of them feed into what Toyota calls the Woven City AI Vision Engine, an agentic system designed to monitor, catalog, and report activity.
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Kota Oishi, general manager at Woven City, said that Toyota has surveyed people around the world, including Americans and Europeans, about their views on privacy and data. While people in Southeast Asia tended to be fairly relaxed about privacy, Japanese respondents were far more cautious, he said.
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"We have our own consent management to ensure that all the data being shared or being collected," he said. "We act under the consent of the data provider."
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"We allow the Weavers to select what they want to share or not. So whether it's nothing or whether it's everything is up to the individual," Absmeier told me. Oishi, the GM, said the vast majority of the Weavers have opted into the roughly 20 experiments currently underway. For example, 98 percent allow a robot with cameras to operate in their homes.
[...] Daisuke Tanaka, a resident of Woven City, is something like an on-site digital matchmaker for Weavers. It's not love they're looking for, though; he connects creators and startups to spark collaborations every second Friday.
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Expansive coworking spaces dot Woven City, designed to foster spontaneous brainstorming, with plenty of 3D printers scattered throughout for rapid prototyping. The stated goal is to spur creation, innovation, and successful startups.
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Residents also help test delivery robots and a device called the Swake, a three-wheeled scooter with a leaning backrest for cornering. I didn't get to ride one, but with a top speed of 12 mph (20 km/h) and a range of 3.7 miles (6 km), the Swake could be a more stable and (and fun) alternative to the average Lime or Bird scooter.
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The 20 prototype Swake machines also can't leave the grounds, which limits the amount of real-world testing they're getting.
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"Ultimately, we have to be a long-term sustainable business," he said.That's why so much Toyota tech is being tested here, including efforts to refine systems like the AI Vision Engine before selling them to municipalities.
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"Physical AI" was everywhere at Woven City: robots of all shapes and sizes that, for the most part, didn't seem to do much.
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The Guide Mobi, however, was more compelling. Like a tugboat guiding cargo ships in and out of port, it's used in Woven City to autonomously move cars from the parking garage to a pickup area for residents. But where a tugboat provides thrust to keep boats moving, the Guide Mobi uses sensors to prevent the cars from going the wrong way.
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It was miserable and rainy for much of the time I spent wandering Woven City, and the moisture was an unfortunate limiting factor for its operations.While the Guide Mobi braved the rain for a test delivery, the Swake tricycles can't run in such conditions.
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and many of the robots we'd been told to expect skittering around the streets had stayed home to keep their sensors dry.
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It wasn't quite Omega Man territory, but I didn't see a single kid playing, dog out for a walk, or citizen running to one of the on-site convenience shops. The electric e-Palettes Toyota uses as buses were empty; they stopped at their stops, waited, and then left without picking up or dropping off anyone.The curtains were drawn on all the apartments I could see, and there was no sign of laundry, bicycles, or other personal items on any apartment balcony.
I had to remind myself that this place is six months old, with only 100 Weavers so far—fewer residents than you'd find at your average Holiday Inn.
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Woven City is Toyota's attempt to not only identify the next mobility zeitgeist but also to ensure it begins to take shape where the company can capitalize on it. It's a big bet, but it's backed by the world's largest car company by volume and one of the few that has managed to consistently deliver products its customers want in a chaotic global market.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06, @07:29AM
I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to create an environment free of the stifling effects of financial concerns, just to see what emerges. I have observed The MBA as being the opposing force to creativity ever since I got into the work force.
Only the ones free to create did so. Everyone else stayed in the rut. North American Aviation. We were well known for doing unique things in unique ways. The people who bought us didn't see it that way.
Today, Elon Musk is that guy. Not us.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 06, @11:58AM (3 children)
Think about the island of Japan... the city of Tokyo: 40 million people @ 6400 people per square km. Los Angeles: 18 million @ 210/km2.
Ubiquitous surveillance is probably already a reality in Tokyo if all the data were shared. Similarly in London, New York, Singapore...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 06, @02:23PM (2 children)
I get that there's quite a number of connected cameras in certain places. However, the number of cameras in Toyota's experimental city/town is much larger and they're all connected to a central AI hub.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Wednesday May 06, @03:12PM (1 child)
A perfect example of "one mans utopia is another mans dystopia". I would not want to live in such an Orwellian nightmare if you paid me to, however there are probably people out there who think it is a wonderful idea to live in such a company-town [wikipedia.org], otherwise they would not be building it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 06, @03:25PM
That's the thing about life... If I could design the surveillance myself I could see how it would be a wonderful thing:
Centrally connected cameras only in public places, but reliably covering pretty much all public places such that nobody can access your private place without being covered by centrally connected cameras.
Centrally connected camera data only accessible "in case of need" - and then only through a specific privacy protecting access protocols.
Private camera data in control of the camera owners, only permissible as evidence if the data owners consent...
etc. etc. etc.
However, these are not the choices we have. We only get to pick from the options available to us, and usually none of those are exactly as we would want them to be...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday May 06, @05:07PM (1 child)
https://www.woven-city.global/ [www.woven-city.global]
It does not seem appealing at all. It's like a company town for workaholics. Very modern and dystopian woven into one. Do they ship in their slave labour that keep the city running from some suburb cause they can't have them defiling their elite project with having normal plebs living there. The once that keep all the other things running like the garbage, cleaning, cooking etc.
Come live and work at the same place and be constantly under surveillance from the corporation. Oh and all your ideas belongs to us since you live at work? If you are made redundant your are also evicted from your home. Convenient ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06, @10:40PM
Google tried to build their city of the future by renovating an older waterfront area of Toronto. Details here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalk_Toronto [wikipedia.org] Here's one section of the wiki page that touches on themes mentioned here:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Wednesday May 06, @07:07PM
Zero accidents in anything physical is an idiotic idea. It will never happen realistically. Sure it's good to try to get a close to 0 as reasonably possible, but the last mile will once again be so hard (impossible really) and ruin so many other things, that it is not worth actually pursuing. Like in this case it will ruin all and any privacy and anonimity, and someone is going to use that power wrong 100% sure, and cost way too much to actually keep it up. And no, it is still not going to prevent all accidents.
I do wish these kinds of fever dreams would stop, so that we can actually focus on realistic solutions to keep people safe without destroying productivity and people's ability to live.