Beautiful, efficient, data-sucking Smart Cities: Why do you give us the creeps?

The ironic thing here is that not everything in a smart city needs to be heavily networked in order to be "smart".

A street light that dims when nobody is around needs a dumb heat/motion sensor, and that's about it. At worst, it might want to know about the nearest few street lights and their motion sensing too, but it doesn't need to know about me, you or anyone else individually, and it doesn't really need to be networked with street lights some miles away. Road junctions can be monitored in volume of traffic and not necessarily by following individual vehicles around using ANPR. Some traffic lights already can detect oncoming traffic to stop people sitting at red lights unnecessarily - no citywide network needed there either.

The problem isn't making things smart. The problem is making things too networked.

We're going to have to burst Huawei's belief in the Platonic ideal. Perhaps make them take freshman Humanities again, and require a passing grade this time.

The problem with the Philosopher King is that such a person doesn't exist in real life.

We distribute power rather than concentrate it not because it's more efficient, but because it's safer.

"the vision only really seems to being put into practice by authoritarian city-state strongmen."

Apart from the vendors I can't think of anyone else who'd want it.

Smart Cities purely a vendor construct

Smart Cities is a misnomer.

I've done a lot of work with parking. Street parking in cities is a huge problem.

However, the root of this problem is a complete and utter lack of the most basic data.

Cities don't even know how much street parking exists in any given area - outside of the ones which are metered - much less give a crap what happens to said supply when construction permits are issued, "urban renewal" projects are initiated which allow store owners to take over street parking, etc.

The sad reality is that city actions - certainly in the realm of parking, and I would expect this in most other areas - arise when sufficient citizens scream rather than through any proactive desire to do good.

I've been in meetings where the city Transport Commissioner was raked over the coals by over 150 irate citizens in a single district.

This same city employs a lot of "Smart City" tech - yet they have a tremendous parking and traffic problem. They've got the induction sensors at chokepoints, they've got the traffic cams, they've got the traffic light control systems - but none of this matters since zoning boards both lack data and would likely ignore it anyway due to "influencers".

Bah!

Not to worry. At the End of Time these so-called "Smart Cities" will all be insane, babbling nonsense to The Dancers.

Cantankerous middle aged men/women like me (and many other El Reg readers) will never bow to our data overlords, but youngsters will grow up with such surveillance, and regard it as normal. We will end up bewildered, impotently shaking our fists. All together now - "It's the ciiiiircle of life"

Luddite central

I never thought that The Register would become the Luddite News.

Cities need to be smart. The alternative is dumb.

And it doesn't necessitate hoovering up tons of personal data - for the most part, it's simply knowing how existing facilities are being used, in order to ensure they keep working (if they can be made to work better, that's a bonus). Indeed, personal data is sod all use to a smart city; it needs impersonal data.

Transport for London (for instance) works much better with smartness, than it ever did with traditional dumbness. It doesn't need to know where I am travelling - only that someone is travelling, on a certain route at a certain time.

Grow up, guys. These computer things are bound to catch on, one of these days.

This is all very scary, largely more than feared !

I had the opportunity to work for a big smart city project, in a non-european country.

I remember this conversation with the (totally bonkers) customer PM:

- me: erm, we won't be connecting the public CCTV monitoring system with the smart home cams systems !

- him: of course it needs to be connected !

- me: ...

It's not known whether they did it at the end, but the fact we had this conversation is telling, regarding the rest.