The smart city is a term lacking a consensus definition (Cocchia 2014), but visions of it provide another way of thinking about AI’s capitalist near future, focused on issues of urban development. Most conceptions of the smart city agree on at least one criterion: the presence of ‘pervasive and ubiquitous computing and digitally instrumented devices built into the very fabric of urban environments’ (Kitchin 2014: 1). These may include sensors and cameras hooked up to various actuators and processors which, through machine-to-machine communication, automatically optimize traffic, maintenance, energy distribution or various other urban flows in such ways that social life is improved. The smart city is thus a particularly urban manifestation of the IoT, but with a tacit political agenda of placing urban development increasingly in the hands of large AI-capitalists. As two critics put it, smart city discourse evinces a ‘free-floating utopianism about governance as a machine that would go of itself’ (Sadowski and Pasquale 2015). Google is, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved in smart city endeavours; as we discuss in Chapter 2, its project to establish a smart neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront was met with local resistance throughout 2018, although its fate remains uncertain.
The so-called ‘democratization of AI’, the smart city and the IoT are all different ways of expressing the notion of ambient intelligence, or ‘electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people’ (Aarts and Encarnação 2006: 1). The goal in the ambient intelligence paradigm is a situation in which ‘devices operate collectively using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting the devices. Lighting, sound, vision, domestic appliances, and personal health care products all cooperate seamlessly with one another to improve the total user experience through the support of natural and intuitive user interfaces’ (Aarts and Encarnação 2006: 1). The goal is that rather than a user responding to their environment, user and environment are to be engaged in an ongoing bidirectional process of interaction (Aarts and Encarnação 2006: 11). There will be a ‘new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems’ (Panetta 2017) and the environment will become ‘proactive’ in its interactions with users (Aarts and Encarnação 2006: 11).
means of cognition
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