{"id":4641,"date":"2023-04-05T08:25:51","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T08:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=4641"},"modified":"2023-04-06T09:44:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T09:44:54","slug":"governing-cities-of-multiple-intelligences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/governing-cities-of-multiple-intelligences\/","title":{"rendered":"Governing cities of multiple intelligences"},"content":{"rendered":"

No longer artefacts of science fiction, artificially intelligences (AIs) are becoming increasingly embedded in our towns and cities.\u00a0 Urban AI can now be found in transport systems such as in robots for grocery delivery and connected autonomous vehicles more generally, as well as in city governance, planning and design practices in the form of so-called digital twins.\u00a0 Indeed, cities of multiple intelligences which include artificial ones have arrived.<\/p>\n

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Grocery Delivery Robots in Milton Keynes (Credit Stephen Potter)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cities are subject to successive waves of socio-technical innovation.\u00a0 In Western countries notable 20th<\/sup>Century examples include electrification of cities and the mass adoption of automobiles.\u00a0\u00a0 More recently, sensor networks and big data hubs have been established in many cities under the auspices of \u2018smart city\u2019 developments which aim to augment city management.\u00a0 While quite diverse in nature, a common feature of smart city developments is the datafication of extant city infrastructures, systems and practices.\u00a0 The logic in play here is to increase our knowledge of the functioning of such urban artifacts which underpin everyday lives in cities and then somehow optimise their performance.\u00a0 Such developments are therefore often deemed technocratic and use 21st<\/sup> century technologies to perpetuate 20th<\/sup> century modernist ideals of efficacy and efficiency embodied in machinic perspectives on cities.<\/p>\n

There is little doubt that urban AI and associated mechatronics and systems are the latest wave of socio-technical change to hit cities.\u00a0 In order to perform AIs have to learn and they have a voracious appetite for data and thus the so-called big data collected in smart city initiatives are useful feeding grounds.\u00a0 Although it is tempting to think that AI is the next step in a data based socio-technical trajectory embodied in smart city initiatives, we argue AIs are quite different to smart city developments and raise particular challenges requiring\u00a0 new conceptual apparatus, as well as governance and management responses.<\/p>\n

First, smart city developments provide data to human governance actors for decision support purposes.\u00a0 In contrast AI based technologies draw upon all manner of data to learn, make decisions and act \u2013 under human supervision or otherwise.\u00a0 Thus AIs are new urban actors who cannot be ignored as without human oversight they may restructure the already technicised relations which constitute the urban and release new potentialities.<\/p>\n

Second, these new urban actors AIs think and act in profoundly different ways to humans.\u00a0 On one hand the ability of AIs to think and act differently may offer considerable utility in achieving the kinds of deep structural transformations which are likely to be required to meet the challenges of climate change.\u00a0 For example, there is little doubt that 20th<\/sup> century thinking and practices associated with automobility need to be challenged and changed.\u00a0 On the other hand, AIs ability to think differently and act autonomously may lead to futures in which it is difficult for humans to relate to AIs and lead to concerns that they may eventually exceed human governance and management capacities.\u00a0 Although such concerns may be exaggerated, there is clearly a need to ensure humans and cities can resist AIs and halt their development and actions as they think fit.<\/p>\n

Conceptual apparatus to govern urban AIs is therefore desperately needed, to realise the benefits of urban AI in attaining more sustainable cities and to avoid deleterious urban futures.\u00a0 However, we cannot simply open the \u2018black box\u2019 of urban AIs to greater scrutiny as we are unable to comprehend how they think.\u00a0 This means we have to accept that the intentions and actions of urban AIs will always be somewhat opaque to human actors.\u00a0 Here conceptual apparatus for governance and management purposes may not be found in focusing on the functioning of urban AIs but in the interfaces associated with them, most importantly human-machine ones.\u00a0 Such approaches chime well with relational geography, which emphasises the role of relations, their intersections, and potentialities in the constitution of space.\u00a0 While there is little doubt that such spatial relations are developed in contingent fashion meaning there is little capacity to control their development, there is a capacity to act and govern urban AIs. Here insights from relational geography and design, perhaps with science and technology studies forming a common theoretical base, might be usefully drawn upon to create requisite conceptual apparatus for the governance of Urban AI.<\/p>\n

Matthew Cook and Miguel Valdez<\/p>\n

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No longer artefacts of science fiction, artificially intelligences (AIs) are becoming increasingly embedded in our towns and cities.\u00a0 Urban AI can now be found in transport systems such as in robots for grocery delivery and connected autonomous vehicles more generally, as well as in city governance, planning and design practices in the form of so-called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4641"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4648,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4641\/revisions\/4648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}