@jwildeboer
I get what you mean. But as you say yourself it's early days still. we cannot judge the maturity of the final outcome yet. We are at TRL 3-4 and I think I am still very optimistic here.
Thanks a lot for interesting topic, I will respond properly later in the day when I am by the computer once again. Walking across the city now....
@qrsbrwn
I took some time to respond and reread your replies. Really, I think we need to consider the overall dynamics of such initiatives and visions and smart cities. Technology is only one aspect of the vision here. Of course the cost drivers lead to centralised solutions, just because engineers "can". Quickly, however, these visions bump into regulatory and law obstacles, which will lead to redesigns, new experiments, new clashes with law and society at large and so on until the public discourse settles on a mutually acceptable solution. I am personally not disturbed, at least not yet.
You might take me for an optimist, but let's take some recent examples. For instance roll-out of smart-grid and smart-meters in the Netherlands and UK (afaik). 1) Initially a strong thrust towards the roll-out, inducing 2) a strong push-back by the society and 3) leading to slow-down and almost stop of the roll-out, towards finally 4) resolving the privacy issues, opt-out policies, etc. and continuation. Another example are self-driving cars (if that vision comes to fruition in our lifetimes at all - it's reasonable to doubt that), or UAVs. Or for instance consider how whatever privacy intruding tech inevitably clashes with German privacy laws and always loses along the way - just because law does not give a damn about tech and trumps tech in the long run (BTW, a very frustrating observation for me as a hi-tech/R&D oriented person).
The bottom-line is this: while technology is capable of fast advancements towards cheap, but _not-so-good_ centralised solutions, the process of its clashing it with the society at large is good and leads to better long-term outcomes. Certainly better than making tech win - as they do by design in China.
My perception of the worries you two expressed is that in the whole process and societal discourse, we arrived at a point where the clash of tech and societal values is becoming apparent. So we get nervous. But I have trust in a good resolution of it, most (if not all) past precedents indicate we are well equipped to solve it well. And again, whatever visions of smart cities/villages entail, these are just prototypes and experiments at this point, nothing permanent. The Technology Readiness Level of this stuff is still frustratingly low (as I said, somewhere like 3-6, locally we are reaching 6-ish in few selected areas).
You also say, we should have a discussion about privacy 20 years ago and in result nation states and corporations are putting us under mass surveillance. Let's put states aside, we have a strong say in how that plays out in the long run (elections). As for corporations, that is inevitable and it is the role of states to regulate it. Personally, I see it happening: c.f., EU vs. big tech. Is it optimal from inception? No. Do corporations abuse their positions in short-term (e.g., a decade)? Yes. Do they get corrected in the long-run? From my vantage point the answer is yes. Would we like it to work faster? Absolutely. But I accept that that that is the nature societal processes - they take time, like years to settle. They are largely decentralised and emergent, rather than designed.
P.S. Sorry for my lengthy rant. These topics are exciting and interesting, but always lead me off-topic :-).
Thanks for the lengthy answer.
What needs to be considered here is that corporations are mandated to maximize profits and will never do anything to benefit someone else unless there is profit to made or regulations that demands it.
The examples you take up shows that a great deal of resources could be saved by designing decentralised services from the start, that way communication could be in lockstep with development. Having specifications, protocols and data flows out in the open from the start saves time too since there it helps show problems early, it can be seen as insurance from backlash.
As for how long we have come and how companies have "corrected", well no. We have via legislation sometimes forced companies to adapt. We have mostly not though, sure GDPR was a step in the right direction for the consumers but it one of few positive examples.
We need to realise that we have most of the work ahead of us.
@jwildeboer
> a great deal of resources could be saved by designing decentralised services from the start
I wish it to be that way too. But trying to do that, I recognise that good decentralised (or generally weakly coupled) technical solutions *always* take the structure of the social interactions around them (as in: is monorepo good for your company, or a multi-repo? depends on how your teams communicate! it holds in software, it holds in urban planning, in architecture, in health-care, everywhere). Now that would suggest that we shall simply analyse and understand how people interact and then build a technical solution to fit it. Unfortunately, it's often impossible because how people interact is not always how 1) they think they interact, and/or 2) they wish to interact. So top-down solutions for such systems rarely work. Personally, I prefer here more the lean-startup way of doing things: 1) do something (MVP), don't care that it's bad, 2) discover the problems it creates, 3) fix the problems on both sides (human, as well as tech), goto 1 - until you either badly fail, or you find an equilibrium point. Is it wasteful? Absolutely? Does it have a higher likelihood of success than a waterfall design? Yes.
> We need to realise that we have most of the work ahead of us.
Can't agree more. But that makes life exciting too 😉 .
I would like to start by saying that I will never ever advocate for a waterfall design, ever.
Sidestepping the loop of black boxes that leads to outrage and pushback is a sign of being agile and understanding who are stakeholders.
That doesn't mean you have to move slow or finish the design phase before building anything.
It just means that one understands that the people who will live in smarts cities are stakeholders and that everyone else isn't dumber than oneself.
I understand that we have different styles of optimism. I look for problems and solve problems, that is what I do anywhere in life.
I know we will eventually get things right but there are ideological struggles that needs to be had.
Since the for the last 20 years the public has been on the loosing side of that struggle and if that trend holds then the smart cities are dystopian cities.
We have the ability to build decentralised software. We are actually quite good at it. In fact, all the things that work well are decentralised or at least fiercely interoperable.
Even telecom networks (from a technical standpoint) and those are built by companies that can only be described as pure evil.
So to sum up, yeah building new things is great but if we want to do it fast we need the acceptance of the people who will use the new things. We get that by understanding their needs.
@jwildeboer