Depending on the habits of city residents, the people in charge of the smart city project in China hope that artificial intelligence will be able to power everything inside it, from public transportation to small services such as coffee delivery robots.
To achieve this goal, Danish architecture firm BIG and Chinese technology company Terminus discussed plans to build an AI-run campus during an online session, according to reports by WE Forum.
Do we trust artificial intelligence?
But the question strongly arises: Do we trust the people who run this AI?
Terminus Group says its project is looking for the comfort and needs of the individual, as robots are supposed to serve coffee according to residents' preferences, and office chairs will rearrange themselves after meetings.
However, there are questions about where does all this citizen data go?
How is it used?
Victor Eye, founder of Terminus, explained that the project, called Cloud Valley, plans to use sensors and devices connected to a "wifi" network to collect data on everything from people's eating habits to pollution.
“We are almost back to the idea of living in a village where the bar owner knows your favorite drink,” says BJ's co-founder Bjark Engels.
"When our environment becomes sensitive and aware, artificial intelligence can do simple things smoothly, because it recognizes incoming people and opens the door in workplaces, so that they do not have to search for their cards," he added.
The Cloud Valley project, launched in April, aims to build a city of about 13 million square feet, the equivalent of about 200 football fields.
Plans
Smart cities risk undermining human rights if companies and governments do not ensure that there are restrictions on surveillance and focus on inclusivity, said Eva Blum Dumontet, a senior researcher with British defense group Privacy International.
"We have to ask: How will the city affect people who might not be knowledgeable about technology, for example," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in email comments.
"This risk increases when there is no legal framework that limits government access to the data collected by private companies," she added.
The folks in Terminus imagine a city where the citizen wakes up to a virtual AI housekeeper named Titan who chooses breakfast, matches your clothes to the weather, and offers you a full day schedule.
Depending on your identity, this may sound like a utopia, or as journalist George Orwell described it in his "1984", a dystopian novel he wrote in 1949 about a city whose residents are automatically monitored.