Augmented Urban Reality
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The problem in New York (and heck, in San Francisco) is that there's very little capacity and a lot of people to use it. One doesn't use an app or sensor-enabled sign to find where to park in Manhattan: you pay for a monthly space in a garage so that you're bleeding slightly less money and so that you have a consistent place to park, or you just use transit like everyone else. One doesn't use free wifi from random kiosks: you buy a cell phone plan so that you can have wireless anywhere (and you install the app to send you a notice when your preferred subway line melts down). Dynamically adjusted parking schemes will not be a welcome component of anyone's day to day life and commute. The traffic-planning data is a marginal improvement over running those little wires over the street to count cars, I suppose, and mmmaybe will help for special events?
The hype is too much. You know what would deserve infrastructure hype? Use traffic data to adjust a real network of driverless cars or something that substantially improves capacity. These nonsense kiosks will probably help out some lost tourists, but the rest of New Yorkers will gleefully ignore them. Bringing up real infrastructure achievements like sewers just makes these look puny.
We see the real motivation at the bottom of the article: targeting advertisements with wifi sniffing. The rest is just part of a sell job.
The kiosks have video cameras in them. Information from kiosks across all 5 boroughs will be processed in real time, aggregated, and mined. This is a big data dream for Alphabet, who will combine street-level activity with information acquired from user's android phones. In exchange for providing Alphabet with valuable insight, civilians get free high speed wifi and some other goodies. Sidewalk Labs, who acquired the creator of the NYC kiosks and operates them is an Alphabet company. I encourage everyone to read through their privacy policy [1].
http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doitt/downloads/pdf/Proposed-PCS-...
(The parent article is more like clickbait. Sad, for the New Yorker.)
Happiness!
How does it relate to this article - does any component besides the Singapore-centric parking-garage app actually contribute meaningfully to urban infrastructure?
The problem is that in urban areas in Asia let's say Heibei + Beijing 100 million people, Greater Tokyo/ Osaka 60 million people, Jakarta, Delhi, Bangkok each 10 million + people, inclusion is a massive problem. Here in Asia, exists tower sprawl where people anonymously exists for years. That is easily the birth-ground for anonymization which leads to seclusion and radicalization. An example are the Japanese hikkikomori.
On the mobility side, I just returned from Chennai. Lookup on Youtube traffic in Chennai. This is pure chaos. My company helps governments across Asia to plan better cities because through my data they know where and when people play, drive, park, go to events. That helps for healthier cities, because new streets can be build and parks and sports centers can be build at the right locations. We give data to justify millions of dollar in urban development.
See, drop!in for example is marketed as a travel app. But it provides a wonderful meta-data-source where events are happening and how many people go there. That knowledge can lead to better organization of public transportation to and from the events.
In addition, this app is community building by bringing in people with similar interest together who might have not met otherwise.
Btw, it might or might not interest you, but all apps are powered by the same back-end giving us the consolidated picture.
Also I consider the "datumplane" from Hyperion novels to provide a lot of the functionality of the modern AI-ssistent or AR tools we are currently imagining.
Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space novels riff on it quite a lot, to the point of several characters that exist more on the augmented side of the reality than in the real world.
> If the automobile caused us to disperse, the information age seems, paradoxically, to be drawing us back together.
Is the author suggesting that technology will encourage the intellectual elite back towards cities? I'm a little confused as to how the introduction ties to the rest of the article.