Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

IBM’s smart city wares. But it soon became clear that looking smart, even more than being smart, was the real force driving mayors into the arms of engineers. “Part of the thinking that you find in elected officials and economic development teams is they want their city to seem modern, to seem Internet-friendly,” Harrison continued. “The people they’re trying to attract are Internet natives who think of the idea of going to a government office and filling out a paper form as a ridiculous procedure. It needs to be on the Web somehow.” Harrison and IBM have absorbed the lesson well. “That was a big surprise to us. We thought that this was going to be about ROI [return-on-investment] models, and the efficiency that we can produce.

To some degree it is, but it’s economic development and competitiveness that’s at the heart of it.”

To experienced city watchers, the “look smart” urge is obvious. For decades, enterprising mayors everywhere have lurched from one urban revitalization scheme to the next—sports stadiums, convention centers, and public Wi-Fi—in an attempt to attract talent and businesses. Are the new urban engineers like IBM’s Harrison and Banavar stumbling into a hornet’s nest of urban policy making, where the variables that need to be optimized are often unclear and routinely fought over with inconclusive results, and where good policies often yield to expedient ones? More importantly, will cities stay committed to these projects, or are control centers like Rio’s destined to become tomorrow’s white elephants?

Even if mayors stay committed to smart-technology projects over the long haul, will IBM’s newfound love for cities last? Fifty years ago, IBM’s leadership decamped from its headquarters in midtown Manhattan to a wooded ridge in Armonk, New York, in 1964, taking thousands of jobs and a big chunk of New York City’s pride with it. The Googleplex of its day, the Armonk campus was a calculated withdrawal from the growing problems of America’s most important city. In the years since, IBM has amassed a tremendous arsenal of talent and technology to tackle urban problems. And while the actual engineers building IBM’s technologies are on front lines all over the world, it is worth pondering whether cities should blindly follow a company that takes its best minds and hides them away in a posh suburb.

Mirror Worlds

The city control room IBM built in Rio shouldn’t surprise us. In 1991 Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter foretold all of it in stunning detail. “This book describes an event that will happen someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality,” begins his book Mirror Worlds. “Some part of your world—the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital—will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places ... fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables ... infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.” It was a vision so all-encompassing and transformational that it spurred mail bomber Ted Kaczynski to break a six-year hiatus in 1993, and dispatch the incendiary missive that narrowly missed taking Gelernter’s life.

Mirror Worlds foretold with astonishing accuracy the way sensing, networking, computation, and visualization are converging in our world today. But what’s really interesting is how over and over Gelernter used cities to illustrate the power of tools that capture vast complexity in real time. It starts on the first page of chapter 1: “Suppose you are sitting in a room somewhere in a city, and you catch yourself wondering—what’s going on out there? What’s happening? ... At this very instant, traffic on every street is moving or blocked, your local government is making brilliant decisions, public money is flowing out at a certain rate, the police are deployed in some pattern.... This list could fill the rest of the book.”

Gelernter’s vision grows even larger when you add the dimension of time. Imagine your local Chinese takeout joint and all the orders flowing in, the tens of millions of rice pails delivered since it opened decades ago, all of the accumulated history of mundane transactions that happened there. Or, in some old-timers’ corner tavern, all of the glasses raised in a century’s libations. Cities are deeply complex, built up through a vast array of small activities that accumulate over time. What if we could record, preserve, analyze, and visualize that detail?

Mirror Worlds described how those images would come to life, not in the form of a machine intelligence that could make sense of it all, but a new kind of all-seeing eye that would give humans the ability to do so. “Mirror worlds,” Gelernter wrote, are “scientific viewing tools” that focus “not on the hugely large or small, but on the human-scale social world of organizations, institutions and machines; promising that same vast microscopic, telescopic increase in depth, sharpness and clarity of vision.” As powerful as zooming into detail was, however, for Gelernter it was a red herring. The real power of mirror worlds wasn’t from insight. What he was after was “topsight... what comes from a far-overhead vantage point, from a bird’s eye view that reveals the whole —the big picture; how the parts fit together.”

As interesting as his descriptions of mirror worlds are, Gelernter’s critique of them is even more fascinating. At the very outset of the book, he declares ’’the social implications of these software gizmos make them far too important to be left in the hands of the computer sciencearchy.”39 Yet not until the book’s bizarre epilogue do we hear another critical word, and it comes in the form of a schizophrenic fictional conversation between Gelernter’s alter egos, a musician named Ed and an electrical engineer named John. On the pages that follow, Ed and John give voice to Gelernter’s alternating excitement and misgivings about a future dominated by mirror worlds. Perhaps he wanted to distance himself from the downsides of mirror worlds he felt obligated to disclose. Perhaps he thought they would be taken more seriously if he did so.

Gelernter quickly gets to the point: humanity will become dependent on mirror worlds, and that will destabilize society. Ed, the critic, makes the case by explaining how the invention of the stirrup spurred an arms race in Europe, bringing about the professionalization of mounted warfare, and the feudal system needed to finance it. Similarly, mirror worlds would spur an informational arms race. Whoever could assemble a mirror world would trounce those who could not. The result would be upheaval. Mirror worlds were “a centrifuge ... designed to stratify society based strictly on a person’s fondness for playing games with machines.”

But it wasn’t just the material basis of society that was at stake in mirror worlds; it was our very minds, our individual and collective process of reasoning. Speaking through Ed, Gelernter writes, “It’s not that I distrust the software guys who design and build them.... They’ll take good care of us. And that’s just the problem. Serfdom means, above all, not slavery—slavery is slavery; serfdom is merely utter dependency —I don’t understand these things but I rely on them, not just for convenience but in order to carry out my thinking !”

As they rush to build their own mirror worlds, what are cities like Rio de Janeiro giving up? As we have seen, the mere appearance of control, the appearance of doing something about the city’s problems with technology, is becoming key to economic survival in a world where cities compete for talent and investment. Yet even as Gelernter frets over dependency on sensor-powered simulations, IBM’s Colin Harrison sees it as simply another risk to be managed. “Society rides a number of tigers,” he explained to me, “where we’ve introduced a technology and we can’t take it away again. Chemical fertilizer was certainly one of those. Electricity is another one.”42 Harrison sees the deployment of smart-city information systems as yet another irreversible layering of technologies atop these earlier inventions. And IBM holds the high ground—swapping out one company’s mirror world for another’s isn’t even an option. Does that make Rio not just a slave to its mirror world, as Gelernter feared, but also to the company that designed and operates it?