Is AI/Robotics the Next Humanitarian Crisis?

I am not afraid of technology.  To make technology is to be human. Technology and humanity are inseparable. My concern rests on the agility of our leading global institutions to engage technology in a manner that does not understand other forms of human organization. Technology is human, but it is not innately social. 

Nearly everyday an apocalyptic statement graces the headlines, announcing the threat of robotics to the global economy and patterns of day-to-day living. Supposedly by 2025, one of every three people will lose his job and become replaced by a robot. Five years later, in 2029, robots will have intelligence equal to humans. Artificial intelligence is the “biggest existential threat” to humanity.

These pronouncements do more to demonstrate a poor comprehension of the technologies and a complete disregard for economic history. Thousands of years of evidence highlight technological change is a healthy thing for labor markets. The counter argument is that emerging developments in robotics concerning automation, computer vision, data analysis, and machine learning are giving rise to a new kind of technology that is different from previous developments concerning hardware or information processing. 

The debate on the integration of computation and human society is as old as computation itself, and contemporary arguments remain rooted in the 20th-century invention of cybernetics, an experimental epistemology concerning the effective organization and communication of integrated social and environmental systems. Norbert Wiener’s theories on systems feed back and interactions with technology were situated within concerns of human ecology and governance. Weiner also projected the eventual creation of the machine a’ governor, a robot government designed to solve any problems to emerge within the government-human economy. In consequence, humans would be free to spend time at leisure while the machines replicated themselves, taught themselves, and effectively solved all possible problems for humans. All hail the machine.

According to roboticist Illah Nourbakhsh, in his book Robot Ethics, the critical difference is that while the developments of the 20th century provided the ability to simultaneously engage and manage multiple streams of information, but the advancement of robotics provides the capability to now distribute multiple forms of action. More significantly, the ability for robots to network, sense, choose, and automate with other robots will eventually lead to strange unpredictable configurations of technology that will blur currently held conceptions of social identity and accountability. To render this probability in the context of advanced capitalism, established modes of socio-economic production are at risk of obsolesce. It will be necessary to invent new modes of value production in society or human beings will be useless.

Wiener’s visions were not unique but predicated John Maynard Keynes' Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. Economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a technologically advanced future relegating the necessity of human labor to a mere 15 hours a week. There was some plausibility to Keynes' vision, as more efficiency in labor does not replace the need for human labor, but rather elevates the value of human labor relative to the demand for production. Of course, if there is a change in demand, and production is not sufficiently responsive to that change, then human labor is devalued. In the case of robotics, it is imaginable that vast networks of robots producing goods in relation to the algorithmic demands of big data would be more responsive to market changes than humans. Already this is evidenced by the application of algorithmic trading in stock markets. Humans can’t compete with networked, data driven, robots on mere market efficiency. The need for human supplied labor is replaced. The externalities are severe. 

Lost human jobs equates to a reduced tax base, reduced social services, lower quality education, reduced social capital, deteriorating communities, crumbling infrastructure, and stunted generational access to social and personal mobility alongside increased depression and substance abuse. To let this possible future, arise anywhere in the world is unconscionable. Surely this can’t happen of course because humans are capable and responsive. New markets can be created. 

Keyne’s argued that the remedy to competition with technology relies on the ability for humans to acquire the sufficient skills to make use of the technology. Keyne’s highlighted this problem as a “temporary maladjustment:, which might require several years for a labor force to catch up to the technology”. But what if the pace of technological advancement is faster than the ability for humans to learn? To close the gap is an ineffective a pointless conquest. In some places – existing urban concentrations of wealth and opportunity like New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Istanbul – this will be true and educated people who inherited rich social assets will make use of the technology. But no one else will ever have a chance to compete.

Clearly, there is a bigger concern that does not emerge in these conversations on robotic futures: Is a world in which day-to-day livelihoods remain under constant threat of technology a desirable world? As the systems of production, exchange, and valuation that drive the technology are the choices and actions of humans, why then could the long term future of the world be one outside of our own choosing? Obviously, systems magnify behaviors, and complex adaptive social systems are virulent landscapes to contain. The complementary mechanisms and conditions of the global economy, such as systems of governance and human security, have struggled to keep pace with socio-economic demand and it is clear that this trend will only get worse.

There have been tremendous strides in the global economy in the last 100 years. International institutions have been founded to advance regulatory measures for human interests. Less people have died of illness or war. More people in the world have accessed education and social mobility than any century in human history. I am confident in those strides and those institutions. My concern rests on the agility of those institutions to engage a technological threat. The problem of Keyne’s “temporary maladjustment” continues to repeat itself ad infinitum, and when the world places blind faith in the advancement of technology, the learning curve becomes painfully steep.

The international humanitarian and human rights regimes are not contemplating this future impact of robotics. Grass roots organizations and urban planning departments are busy replicating the status quo. In the meanwhile, cybernetics hasn’t died in the minds of military engineers and industrial capitalists remain quick to take advantage of grand visions of a perfectly automated society. We are sold conveniences but in exchange purchase longterm economic servitude.  There is a demand for another approach, other ways for thinking and acting are essential to guide the advancement of human living. Buried beneath the layers of ideology and intent, our globally distributed modes of production and exchange all contain a shared thread and this thread elicits a new possibility for design.

The Execution Gap : Bottom Up and Top Down is a False Paradigm

Over the last 16 years I have spent a lot of time with people who have committed their lives toward social change.  Historically these people were architects in rust-belt cities and then aid workers in refugee camps.  Later I worked with lawyers and government officials in government offices. Today I continue the same work, but work with electrical engineers and data scientists. As I continue to engage the same kinds problems but across wildly different disciplines, it has become clear that many of the deeply entrenched beliefs of one group are completely foreign or irrelevant to another. 

For most of the 100+ year history of urban planning, the cannon of planning theory describes top-down vs bottom-up processes. Various terms are used to describe this such as "centralized vs decentralized" or "rationalist and grass roots." A few other sub-models of planning have emerged, such as Advocacy Planning and Participatory Action models. What has been less dominant is a recognition that our technologies are a big part of the planning process. Consideration of the technology as an equal force throughout the process opens many new directions for exploration. More importantly, technologies such as machine learning, when applied to dormant low-tech economic sectors, are far more powerful change agents than people. 

A critical question that has been consistently absent from planning theory concerns use of the appropriate technology relative to the complexity of the problem and idea. Why spend a million dollars, engage hundreds of people, conduct dozens of technical studies, and then document a robust vision for the future in only a book or a website? How do these technologies advance the implementation of the vision? These technologies increase risk because the translation of a complex vision from written text into built form or economic process is a massive leap.

There are other ways of course. Through small scale pilots, rapid trials, online Wikis, collaborative mapping sessions, partnerships with local technology companies (big and small), one can always find a way to create new experiences.  A classic example is from the Czech Republic; after the fall of communism a process was needed to rapidly educate the public on the history of their nation which had been suppressed under totalitarian rule. Rather than merely release a book, the city of Prague presented a living timeline of Czech history. Maps, photos, documents, and didactic panels lined the main streets so that citizens can walk through the history of their nation and learn how one era informed the next.  Woven into the architecture, the city itself functioned as the core technological platform to engage citizens and enhance thinking on the needs and futures of the nation-state.  As a robust experience, it also created stakeholder buy-in for the next logical step.

Design as a Process of Optimization

To develop a concept and not implement as part of the ideation process is high risk. Working at the EPA, for example, I find it very hard to convince leadership and scientists that a particular organizational or technical change is possible. For many decades, people have made suggestions and introduced new visions, but rarely have these been successful.  In contrast, I find a way to rapidly prototype every idea. Should we create a new division? Lets get some people to volunteer and test how this division might operate. Should we purchase an enterprise solution?  Lets get the 30 day free trial and see how we might need to also change if we buy it. Rapid prototyping any kind of solution will always give more information and reduce risk.

Planning and Design as Synthetic Futures

As Herbert Simon pointed out, the scientific method is an excellent way to understand the natural world that is around us, yet when faced with creating something new in the world - and thus artificial - we turn to design. The more we understand the design process, and how it is similar or different from the scientific method, the better we can design and introduce new things into the the world.

The role of design as an additional demand - to not only stretch and reveal what is possible in the future - but to help us get to what is preferable future. Empowered with the ability to make something new, design is a means to consider multiple future realities, and equipped with the ability to implement them, each idea on a  possible future exists in a state between idea and reality. Consequently, mindfully experimenting with a material process to test implementation measures and reduce the risk, one develop synthetic futures and transform them into new realities.

Technology Determined Cities or Strategic Design for Tomorrow?

Imagine if urban planners had more knowledge about cars long before automobile traffic was a common issue. Imagine if they had better understood chemistry or environmental sciences. How could that have changed the transit landscape? Could today's problems of automobile pollution or over-dependency on oil been curbed at the outset? Maybe, maybe not, but urban planners can change the future if they change their relationship to technology and the processes by which technologies are created.

Urban and socio-economic development are continually framed as a top-down or a bottom-up system of human decisions. Either the messiness of political action informs and determines the form and function of our lives or policy choices are made by experts reliant on consultation data. Yet this model fails to describe how the environment and the objects around us shape and structure our lives.  Development is not purely determined by people but also by places and things. We might believe we are designing our future, but much is predetermined by what we have designed in the past, by the technologies presently in development, and by the physical conditions of our designing. As long as urban professionals and policy makers ignore such factors, strategic design and policy will rarely accomplish what is intended.

Humans can synthesize DNA, break the sound barrier, and investigate distant galaxies. We wear computers that monitor our bodies and transport information at the speed of light. In the meanwhile, we compose our urban visions in massive paper books of zoning code and render aerial maps on a digital screen to shape the future.  Interesting technologies pop up almost daily that can provide value to urban planning and design, yet as a whole, these technologies are not thoughtfully integrated within planning practice. Certainly planners might use a given technology, but that is not the same as building a mindful socio-technical practice with the technology. Case in point, when I hear the words "how can a planner use a drone?" it is the engineer and the robot that is carving the pathways of our urban future - not the urban professional. There is also a particular moral imposition within the design of a drone - aside from the thinking of the engineer - wherein the design of the artifact delegates use and consequence.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist on the subject of drones in urban planning and was surprised that all of the questions were focused on how planners should use these technologies. There were no questions about the possible negative results or externalities. There were no questions about the responsibility of planners to design new technologies themselves, or to work with groups of software engineers in the same way we work within community groups.

In its current form, the entire field of urban planning is reliant upon the visions of engineers at companies like ESRI, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Google. These companies showcase their products to urban planning departments stating "now you can do this thing we think is important." If the message is not clear enough, planners look at the technology and say "what do we do with this?" in an attempt to fit the solution to an unknown problem. The search by planners to incorporate drones into their work is a good example.  Certainly there can be a use, but does the drone solve a known problem or does it require the formation of a new problem? Do we want or need that new problem? The answer varies by time, place, and circumstance but I suspect these new problems often distract from more essential demands.

Consequently the technology startups, major corporations, product supply chains, and DIY hackers are designing our future cities - not designers, developers, or policy makers.  Any time a planner asks "how can I use a drone?", they are placing faith into the mind that designed the robot, the design of the robot, and the capability of the machine. Consequently we need urban professionals who are proactive in the technology creation to say "I want X to do Y so I can get Z," and sufficiently understand the technology to see this vision become reality.  If we are truly in touch with urban systems, we should have the vision and capacity to design our own tools to work with those systems.  The ability to make informs the ability to vision, and more importantly, it is the basis to executing that vision.

Planners have long been at fault for separating vision and implementation. In Yves Deforge's essay Avatars of Design: Design Before Design, the author recounts how renaissance inventors and designers for several centuries generated detailed plans with little understanding on how to implement them, leaving that task to another class of producers.  By the time of the 20th century, the role of artistry in mass production had been squashed, eclipsed by the rise of the Eiffel tower, embodying mathematics and engineering in place of design. The role of the designer whose job was to conceive new ideas fell into the shadow of the engineer who gave form to the possible.

In recent decades, the field of design and the planning profession has shifted toward human-centered methods as mathematics cannot alone solve all problems or generate positive human environments. Yet unlike planners, most of today's UX designers are more tightly connected to the DNA of their tools. They can write software and scripts to automate processes and they can construct new tools to make new visions into realities. When they are limited to produce something they envision, they share common vocabularies with engineers to give form to their intentions.  These designers do not need to be engineers, but their tacit knowledge and skills are sufficient to inform new ways of thinking, designing, and making.

So what of the future concerning new technologies in robotics, big data, and AI? Will humans be replaced by intelligent and superior machines? If the outcomes of the Darpa Grande Challenge are sufficient indicators (below), we are not at risk right now of any threats from these emerging technologies. Notably, none of the robotics teams included an architect or planner, even though every robot was tasked with managing the built environment. There is a clear demand for urban professional among the machines.

Will planners continue to react to the work of engineers, forever a decade or two behind the technology?  Already there is a deluge of books, podcasts, and news specials describing how new breakthroughs will change the economic landscape. People will lose their jobs to robots.  Cities will smolder amid collapsed economies. Or in contrast, planners could create a new preferable future, by repositioning their relationship to technology, taking hold of the materials, engaging the engineers, and embed themselves into the processes that shape our economic landscape. They can make digital tools and participate in the working groups that build the machines. They can take the lead in designing tomorrow and not just react to its arrival. They can design the future.

The Emerging Future of Cities

I travel a lot, and just in the last year I've spent time in some of the worlds wealthiest cities, its poorest, and its most rapidly changing.  London, Dubai, Bangkok, Istanbul, Detroit, and Mogadishu are just a sample.  I also am a constant reader and love to learn new skills in computer science and business strategy.  So out of this mix I have some observations and some proposals on how these observations will evolve.  Is it an optimistic future? For those who can adapt it will be incredible. And for everyone who refuses to do so... not so much.

*Edit: Please note this is not a prescription for future cities.  My objective here is to identify variables and perceptions that are currently not central in discussion yet are central to the realities of tomorrow.

Dynamic Urban Interface

For many years we have described the cyber world as separate from the physical world. This way of thinking needs to stop. There is an interface between the cyber/physical, and this interface is of critical to the future world. As found in a timely piece in Science Magazine, the internet is about to get physical.  Or maybe it has been for awhile. For example, a new post from Brookings Institution suggests that humanitarians should consider the implications of cyber warfare upon mass displacement.

Interaction is Experienced Through Environments

The form of this interface is changing at a rapid rate and accelerating. Only 10 years ago the primary way to use a computer was with a keyboard. Now you can shake it, throw it, walk past it, or swallow it.  This will continue to change and more quickly.

Physical environments are likewise responding to the transformation of the digital interface. The digital urban interface is essential to the future evolution of urban planning, architecture,  and design into a broader field of urban experience design. How we choose to embrace Urban Experience Design in relation to economic policies, organizational systems, and business strategy will continue to be disappointing. While the world is changing quickly, people are not changing with it fast enough to create better policies, markets, or in general, a better world.

Shifting Infrastructures

Robust digital urban infrastructures are the key to making the best use of the digital urban interface. The digital urban infrastructure exists as an interconnection of hardware (physical networks, physical computing sensors), software, and data as input in the form of GIS data, core urban analytics (traffic, pollution, security, water). The speed of these systems to acquire input and process it into a meaningful output (forms vary) will distinguish the ability for one city to embrace greater economic growth than another. Today we have smart cities... so consider how much computing has changed in the last 25 years and apply this same rate of transformation to the year 2039. The curve is exponential.

The New Slum is a Digital Wasteland

The 20th century observed the rise of the middle class and the 21st century is giving way to its demise. The cities with the most optimistic futures are the ones that can connect its citizens to the information and tools needed to compete within a global market place. A good example is this forward-thinking library in Chattanooga that has invested heavily in equipment and seminars for 3d printing and product fabrication technologies. Of course when I asked a librarian in Detroit about this, her response was "it will be very difficult for me to convince the board to put our 300 dollar budget for acquisitions toward new technology since we have so little to work with." Communities that adapt to the speed and interconnectedness will thrive and communities that do not will die. More importantly, communities of data creators will thrive, while concentrations of data consumers will collapse inward, as winner-take-all markets continue to thrive.

Integrated Supply Chains

Even today it is difficult for most companies to track each element of a supply chain. The Conflict Minerals Trade Act has provided incentive for technology companies to shift their practice of component sourcing. Interest in companies like FoxConn have pushed for better treatment of workers. Ultimately this trend will continue. Companies must have better monitoring mechanisms, and our physical environment will transform in response to the demand. Yet this will be expensive. Obtaining a granular level of information will generate new opportunities to cut cost and increase profits. The cost of this refinement will be passed to consumers, exerting more pressure upon a shrinking middle class.

Kanban Urban Management 

Extreme socio-economic polarization combined with integrated supply chains and robust digital infrastructures will create new city management models.  Kanban management methods focus on just-in-time implementation and production. Zero overhead.  Zero waste.  For example, digital sensors in the street will notify the city of a pothole, its dimensions, and location. A service worker is immediately dispatched with the appropriate amount of filler. Problem solved with precision. We won't be perfect at this for a long time - there is a steep learning curve - but the future financial constraints will ultimately demand the emergence and implementation of this technocratic model.

Pioneering Urban Experience Design (The New Scale of UI/UX)

For the last 10 years I have worked in some of the world's most brutal conditions.  Along the way I've made and lost friends, witnessed miracles and tragedies, and have immersed myself into every moment of it.  But I've always known that this is not a sustainable or necessarily healthy way to live.  In my desire for a full life, I cannot always live and work in war and violence.   So a few years ago, just at the same time I took up residence in Afghanistan, I began laying the foundation to one day take all the lessons hard-learned from the battlefield into a different direction.

Shifting the Terrain at HSpace

At the beginning of 2014 I transferred my practice from Kabul, Afghanistan to Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is famous for its poetic ruins and tragic rate of decay.  I have also continued to work abroad - in fact, I am posting this blog post from downtown Mogadishu at this very moment.  And in the meanwhile I have experimented with new methods to engage urban environments and to create technologies that shift the way we experience the world around us.

Today today my work is a fusion of deep theoretical understanding of complex urban environments and cutting-edge experiments in physical computing and design strategy.  Although it has not been featured online, much of my time since January has been heavily occupied in a partnership with a global technology giant to develop a new technology to monitor events in Syria.  Those who were present for my talk at the School of Visual Arts in New York City got a sneak-preview of the work we have undertaken.

In my off-hours, I've also been bashing out an array of prototypes and design mockups, primarily in the realm of augmented reality, experimental cartography, and drone-based design.  Here is a sample.

Choose Your Adventure - The Mobile AR Experience

Problem: I've never been a fan of video games.  There is nothing wrong with them, but my sense has always been - why play a game when you could live it?  In fact, I recently discovered that playing a video game will satiate my desire to explore the more challenging environments in the world.  But playing a video game also imposes tremendous limitations.

Concept: What if we combine geo-caching exploration with AR gameplay?  What if we use our existing mobile technologies, gps positioning, social networks, and user-generated rating systems to refine the games?

Below I've put together two brief concept videos to show how this can work.  The first video presents how such a game could be organized. The second video presents some screenshots of how such a game would function.

The cool part:  This is an entirely new way to engage our cities and communities.  Your city is no longer just an environment, but it is also an interface, stacked against a digital interface, so as to participate in the construction of new narratives.  The natural syntax of our urban environment shifts, opening new interpretations of space, time, and meaning.  Consequently the identity of the city is no longer what you see in the street, but also how it is constructed in the cloud.  Like your online digital identity, cities can have a digital self, to be pushed-probed-and-hacked.  We've had this digital infrastructure for years, but we lack sufficient methods to maximize its potential.

(Best enjoyed with headphones or decent speakers)

Created in 2014 by Mitchell Sipus

Conceptualizing the City as a Synthesis of Habits

When I started my education in city planning, I took a course on urban form, wherein Jay Chatterjee introduced a different perspective on the organization of cities every week.  Jay knew his stuff, having studied with Kevin Lynch and later, as university president, having led the way to a master plan for the University of Cincinnati featuring an array of established architects.  In fact, studying at UC DAAP was basically akin to studying at a museum of architecture, surrounded by buildings designed by the likes of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenmen, and Michael Graves (himself a DAAP alumnus).

In Jay's class we looked at the history of how a cities have been conceptualized.  Renaissance diagrams of the city as a human body compared roads to arteries and parks to lungs.  Then of course there was explorations of the city as a mandala or as an ecology.  I found these approaches to interesting at the time.

But now, after having worked extensively within complex urban systems, I find them as little more than poetic and perhaps damaging.  To an extent there is truth.  Cells combine to create tissue, tissues combine to create organs, organs combine to create organ systems, and organ systems combine to create an organism.  Thus if to combine organisms you create an complex organic system (city) and to combine these urban systems you create another macro-entity (state). But how does this conceptual organization of systems help advance the needs of the people within it?  How does this framework provide any utility for intervention and to what end?

As an organic system, we can examine capital flows, supply chains, and nodes of interaction just as one would examine the circulation of blood or oxygen.  Milieus of capital and power will intersect in a fashion that is either harmonious or catastrophic.  An array of intersections will form hierarchies in the form of institutions, or institutions will harness the dynamics of these nodes by means of hegemony. Clearly the metaphor can be extended, but what can an urban planner or designer make of this?

I'd argue very little because ultimately it is only a metaphor, an approximate model of reality, and models are fairly archaic in the contemporary world.  With an abundance of technologies to measure and predict interactions, we can do better than model our environments, but we can create new methods to engage, measure, and predict the events around us.  Today, the model and the reality are the same thing, if they are not - then you are doing it wrong.

I say this because we must take for granted that all urbanism is self-organizing, and once we acknowledge that, we are better positioned to ask the more important question: how does a self-organized system actually operate and to what end?  

Now we have an opportunity.

A city, like a business, is better understood - not as an organism or geometric mandala - but as a collection of habitual processes that have organized in time and space to form a collective habit.  This collective habit continues to operate because it has survived to do so.  Any imposition that will undermine the collective habit will force adaptation (new habits) or it will die.  A good example can be found within most manufacturing companies - either they keep with the times or they go out of business.  

At the granular level, changing one individual's habits will merit only limited impact (thus a new mayor or president can only do so much), while changing a large collection of granular habits will lead to a massive change at a larger scale.  This is incredibly difficult but possible.  Take for example the changes in popular music.  While a dominant musical paradigm is perpetuated at the collective scale, a new form of music may grow in appeal at the fringe which will eventually become popular.  No behaviors changed - all people continued listening to music with the same supportive behaviors - but the music selection changed, and thus we find certain elements attached to the music (fashion perhaps) also rising to the fore.  Now we can ask, why has a new form of music replaced the other?  What drove the sustainability of that change?  The habits did not change, but the form of each habit was modified, so how did that work and how can I use the same methodology in my own project?

Conceptualizing a city as a collection of habits will do more for a designer than conceptualizing a city as a body, beast, or geometry.  In the reductionist sense, we can examine the procedure of those habits and fine tune our environments to respond.  For example, if we find that people habitually congregate in a given location, we can  capitalize upon their congregation or choose disrupt the location to redistribute the population, and replicate the process at within all similar environments to the same effect.  Or, from a constructivist perspective, we can examine the array of elements that inform the formation of that organization, and attempt to infuse other environments with those elements to stimulate similar activity, hoping that the inhabitants will contribute something else to create a positive outcome.  

Contemplating a city as a collection of habits will not solve all problems. Yet it provides more utility than visualizing the city according to classical metaphors because it provides opportunities for intervention.  Likewise, I encourage interested readers to create other paradigms for interpreting cities but to never get stuck on any particular idea as the ideal.   For example, thinking of a city as a creative entity, aka Richard Florida, is fine.  But if you really plan to leverage that concept for your own city... don't expect much return.  That singular notion, like any other, is merely an approximation - a model - and therefore it will only reap so much reward.  Rather you need to go beyond the limitations of a single ideology. Believe in nothing. Believe in everything.

For example, what does it mean to examine the city as each of the following? How can you build off of these idea to create opportunities toward a given objective?  Simply challenging yourself to organize your thoughts around each of these given prompts will provide a new way to think of human structured environments in a manner to reveal restrictions, possibilities, mechanisms, and more.  If you map out a series of ideas based on each prompt you will also discover many conflicts will emerge.  That is good. Embrace the frictions and the voids because these points are perhaps more important than the symmetries.

• City as record
• City as interface
• City as library
• City as software
• City as hardware
• City as inheritance
• City as puzzle
• City as experiment
• City as a game
• City as language
• City as narrative
• City as reaction
• City as sport
• City as reproduction
• City as resistance
• City as byproduct
• City as ...

The Human Latency of Smart Cities and Data Driven Reward Systems

Last week the number of participants registered with the US healthcare website were released and the results were unimpressive. This could be for many reasons, although personally, I have not enrolled simply because the website, like all technologies, is an iterative process.  Whenever a new operating system rolls out for my laptop or ipad, I'm always excited, but I'm never an immediate adopter.  I typically wait until an update is launched, which is typically about 2 weeks later.  I'm rather excited by the healthcare initiative, but it would be foolish to rush into enrollment.  The website, like all technologies is a work in progress.

The constant media coverage about the dismal enrollment numbers has been paralleled only by NSA scandals which has done much to raise the social dialogue on issues of connectivity, surveillance, and our data driven lives.  In a few previous blog posts I've reflected on the persistence of data beyond communal memory.  This week I've had some time to read some of Anthony Townsend's new book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.  Concurrently I've also been reading Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll.  While both of these texts appear to handle different subjects, I'd argue that their is actually a strong link between these works and the current issues of technology in society.

Within Smart Cities, Townsend begins with a historical overview of urban technology development and describes the evolution of major corporations presently working with these issues such as Siemens, Cisco, and IBM.  He identifies established and emerging systems to contend with urban planning issues of climate change, traffic, and economic growth.  But Townsend isn't advocating for these mega-companies to dominate data-driven urban development.  Rather, he advocates for a more widely distributed net of stakeholders, consisting of empowered everyday citizens who use technology to interface with their governments and businesses to create a bottom-up model of a well designed urban landscape.  

I've met Anthony a couple times and have followed his work for many years.  Last June I sat in the audience at Poptech The City Resilient and listened to his talk on designing a wireless network in New Jersey that will continue to function under threat of natural disaster.  His faith in smart systems is optimistic, yet carefully hesitant, and I believe his argument for the creation of smart cities to be a more democratic process to be on target.   

Yet my own concern about smart cities is less about the actors involved in the creation of the technology and the control of the data, but is more interested in the actual "recipes" used to streamline the city.  When I lived in Cincinnati, I recall it had demographic and economic qualities nearly identical to the city of St. Louis.  Consequently, it was common for these two city governments to simply share or sell each other studies on their own cities (such as research on industrial clusters) rather than conduct the work internally.  If somethings works in St. Louis, then it should work in Cincinnati!  On a different scale, I've also sat in several meetings with members of the United Nations advocating a similar boiler-plate approach to urban development - even if the project failed in the first instance, it would be replicated and applied to the second.  

Consequently I believe that an extensive level of qualitative research must be done before any quantitive system can be constructed and applied to a given city.  Of course this is expensive and methodical mess, so probably not in the interest of companies like IBM.  This is where Anthony and I overlap.  If the work is done by the local communities, then the outputs will likely best conform to the local demands.  

Anthony advocates and hopes for the widespread participation of urban citizens in the creation of smarter cities.  He does well to identify many small organizations working to teach programming and give momentum to local-scale smart city development.  But here we differ again... my outlook is gloomier.

For much of internet history, we have mostly lived under the 90-9-1 rule - wherein 1% of internet users create content, 9% curate, and 90% consume.  In the 20 years we have had the internet, this has improved as online content creation has risen with the advent of social media.   In 2004, The Pew Research center found that 44% of internet users had actually created content on the internet.  Now, Pew has found that number has drifted upward to 54% in 2013. I should add that the Pew Research Center released another study identifying that 15% of Americans are not even online.    I realize this is a a very small snapshot, but does this rate imply that it will take 99 years for 100% of internet users to also become content creators?  But what is a more reasonable number? 50 years? 20?  

If 20 years of global internet access has resulted in only 50% of all internet users to become content creators, how will this translate to more technical processes such as coding?  Yes - there are many high quality online tools today for people to learn computer programming skills for free.  I am personally a frequent user of such tools.  But this stuff is not easy, requires discipline, and is not a skill set available in a readily consumable manner.  More importantly - there is an issue of incentive.

Participation in any enterprise requires an incentive, but the situation darkens when the enterprise has a steep learning curve.  Apparently health care and national security are not a sufficient incentive for most Americans to use a website or forsake personal data.  But in contrast, millions of Facebook users supply very personal details of their lives to the Facebook company for the satisfaction of gossip, shared photos, and adorable cat videos.  What incentives exist for a democratized process of urban systems design?

This is where I feel Schüll's research on human addiction to casino machine gambling might provide light.  Casino machines are highly refined to maximize the amount of time an individual spends on the machine.  Casinos also employ various design techniques to drive customers toward machines and increase time of play.  But many casino's now feature data driven analytics to refine the experience further, to create new machines, and to ultimately derive far higher profits.  An excellent example is the use of rewards cards.

Subscribed loyalty rewards programs encourage repeat visits but they also give customers a reason to share data.  By providing customers with free rooms, meals and tickets to special events - or even paid weekend resort getaways for high rollers - casinos provide a series of convenience and in exchange, capitalize on the windfall of collected data.  Many casinos maintain 90 different demographic categories on each customer, can predict future calendars and budgets, and generate behavior reports to assemble the best package of rewards to offer each individual.  If a customer strays from pattern... for example, a habitual gambler stops making visits, that person will be emailed, snail mailed, and telephone called with enticing offers to return.  

This creepy surveillant system has been of great value to the casino industry.  It works.  But it also appears to be popular with patrons.  According to Schüll, in Las Vegas casinos, "70% of gamblers use loyalty club cards" and the number continues to rise.  Apparently the provision of personal information to a corporation is okay in exchange for a hotel room and a prime-rib dinner.  But website enrollment for affordable healthcare?  Snooze.

A distinct difference between the task/reward systems of the casinos and the healthcare enterprise is that in the healthcare website, an individual must still express a level of work and payment in exchange for the reward.  Whereas in the casino system, it appears to consist entirely of rewards for the user.  The array of losses are behind the scenes.

So returning to the issue of "who" leads the charge in the creation of smart cities, I honestly don't see a great degree of grass-roots design unless the amount of effort is reduced and a direct system of ongoing incentives is increased.   The success of the Citi Bike initiative in New York City is a good example. Users enjoy the convenience of an affordable system, brought about through public-private partnership, and the primary sponsor CitiBank maintains a constant influx on user data with which to capitalize. Perhaps in the end the only real winner will be the bank, but right now it appears as a worthwhile exchange for over 100,000 enrolled bike users. 

Perhaps this rewards model can be applied somewhere as we continue down the road of data driven city optimization.  Maybe a clear system of direct incentives can be provided in exchange for citizens to contribute to the creation of better neighborhoods and the sharing of personal data.  Maybe one day, however, the simple rewards of a safer, cleaner neighborhood will be enough?