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

While mirror worlds like Rio’s are today designed only for managing cities, the topsight they deliver will be utterly seductive to anyone charged with planning them. But history suggests that these kinds of technologies can be dangerous. As urban planning scholar Tom Campanella explains in Cities From the Sky, the invention and widespread use of aerial photography has inflicted untold damage on cities. First, it was used to systematically survey cities for the purpose of planning and targeting bombardments during World War II. Afterward, it provided the perch from which modernizing mayors, developers, and urban planners reigned as virtual gods. Detached from the life of the street, this new perspective inspired soulless designs for modern, mega-scale cities.

Mirror worlds may also create opportunities to improve city planning, by improving our understanding of how cities change over time. Aerial photography showed us only the muscular and skeletal structure of the city. Examining smart cities’ sensors will reveal their circulatory and nervous systems. For the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see an organism—instantaneously and in excruciating detail, but also alive. Today we see them the way astronomers see a heavenly body —as it was, some time ago, light-years in the past. Because of this lag, we plan the future for cities that have already changed into something else.

Still, better topsight wont tell us much about lives of those who actually live in the city. By editing out the “chaotic multi-sensual reality... the sights, the sounds, the smells, the character of the people,” as Gelernter described it, mirror worlds leave out the subjective reality of city dwellers themselves. What can better topsight tell us about the street-level insights of everyday people? It might just distract us from those voices.

One hot summer morning in 2011, twenty years after Mirror Worlds hit the streets, I lay reading it under a tree across the river from Manhattan. Toward the end of his alter egos’ debate, Gelernter’s thought experiment finally reaches its conclusion—mirror worlds would end the philosophical struggle between the rational objectivism of science and the irrational emotionalism of romanticism that stretched back to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The romantics worldview, driven by nature and human sensuality, “is dying, because it’s inefficient. It doesn’t produce anything. Except maybe a vague sense of well-being; but so does a bottle of wine.” As I had learned about cities over the years, I would often daydream mirror worlds of my own, trying to imagine all of those rich happenings in the metropolis around me. I put the book down and indulged myself to build one last mirror world of my own, trying to see in my mind’s eye the cars moving along the West Side Highway, the fares of all the taxis in Manhattan adding up, the bits flowing in on cables under the river. Someday soon, IBM will switch on a real mirror world of Manhattan and destroy the wonderful ephemerality of it all for me, forever. As for Gelernter, “The future is clear. Know everything, feel nothing.” Romanticism was on life support. “And Mirror Worlds have the stuff to kill it.”

The Psychohistorians

Gelernter foretold the mirror worlds IBM is installing in cities around the world. But the first attempts to use computers to simulate, manage, and plan cities date back to the Cold War. In 1951, Isaac Asimov, the legendary science fiction writer, opened his sci-fi classic Foundation with a scene that is familiar to anyone who keeps a tablet computer at hand: “Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon’s nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the files and rows of buttons that filled its surface. Red symbols glowed out from the upper tier.”

In the novel Seldon leads a renegade sect, the “psychohistorians,” who have developed a “branch of mathematics that deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli.”46 Wielding advanced statistics, psychohistorians aspired to predict the future. And Asimov had a knack for inspiring readers to make his visions of the future come true. Foundation urged an entire generation to try to tame society with math and computers. Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, once said “I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get.”

Much like economics today, Asimov’s psychohistory was a dismal science, riddled with guesswork. In the opening pages of Foundation , Seldon indoctrinates Gaal Dorneck, a new apprentice, in the art of psychohistory:

He said, “That represents the condition of the Empire at present.”

He waited.Gaal said finally,

“Surely that is not a complete representation.”

“No, not complete,” said Seldon.

“I am glad you do not accept my word blindly. However, this is an approximation which will serve to demonstrate the proposition. Will you accept that?”

Asimovs depiction of psychohistory was inspired by the new field of cybernetics. Along with nuclear fission and rocketry, the costarring technologies in the science fiction of the day, automated control systems were one of the great technological leaps of World War II. Led by Norbert Wiener at MIT, cybernetics built on wartime research in antiaircraft targeting techniques that used past observations of flight trajectories to improve predictions of an aircrafts future position. Cybernetics took the idea of using sensing and feedback to optimize performance and extended it to the universe generally. To cyberneticians, everything—machines, organizations, cities, even the human mind—could be seen as a system, a balanced network of things connected by information flows. The components of any system, and the flows between them, could be represented as a set of equations that together could replicate the behavior of the whole, they believed. With this mathematical “model,” an analyst could make predictions simply by changing the inputs and observing the ripple impacts propagate throughout the simulation. It was an immensely powerful idea. Cybernetic thinking inspired new directions in engineering, biology, neuroscience, organizational studies, and sociology.

Cybernetics underpinned the plotline for Foundation , but advances in computing provided the props. Just weeks before the 1945 American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vannevar Bush published a seminal article in The Atlantic that laid out a road map for the computer age. Bush was a technological authority without equal, an MIT man who during World War II had directed the entire US scientific effort, including the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear weapons used against Japan. Like Asimov’s psychohistorians, who wielded tablet computers as cognitive prosthetics as they built their socioeconomic simulations, Bush believed that the new thinking machines would liberate the creative work of cyberneticians from the drudgery of computation. “The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature,” Bush predicted, “and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more.” A mathematician, he wrote, “is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane.... All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood.” The essay is often cited for its description of a hypothetical device Bush called the “memex,” a startlingly prescient depiction of the Web browser. But Bush also foresaw the application of computers to understanding entire societies. “There will always be plenty of things to compute,” he wrote, “in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”