Emergent Digital Practices

emergentfutures:

“Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention. Built-from-scratch cities have been popping up for years, but fully sentient ones are only in the prototype stage (PlanIT Valley will have just 150,000 residents). And their goal, as with all sentient beings, is to replicate. The percentage of global city dwellers will surge to 70 percent by 2050, and many of the fastest-growing cities are sprawling eco-disasters in the making. PlanIT Valley’s hyper-efficient model promises to be bright green. A white paper created by Living PlanIT, the company designing PlanIT Valley, details an techno-paradise of energy conservation. (Living PlanIT did not respond to requests for comment.) Cars are guided toward empty parking spaces, personal computers are engaged to run the UOS when they’re sitting idle, and rooms not only lower the air conditioning when you’ve left them (yes, the system will know when you’ve left them), but can even decide whether it’s worth it to do so based on how long you typically leave that room vacant. But wait, there’s more! Leaky faucet? The UOS can detect it, and if it can’t do the repair remotely, will dispatch a plumber. Lose your child? Surveillance cameras might be swiveled to ascertain “the child’s current location and activity.” Apartment on fire? The UOS will alert the fire department, direct each resident to the safest exit, adjust the neighborhood’s traffic lights to clear a path for the incoming trucks, tell the firefighters which parts of the building are affected and the locations of anyone inside, automatically unlock doors and windows, increase pressure in that neighborhood’s water mains, and allocate patients in priority order when they arrive at the nearest hospital.”

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Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction - Salon.com (via myserendipities)

For my students who thought that the networked toilet was satire.