Driverless Government: Speculation, Citizenship and Collective Civic Intelligence

Abstract

This article examines data, algorithms and machine learning as the new materials that make cities smart. Analyzing the threat of relying on digital tools made by corporations to govern and regulate will also provide insight into possible areas in which citizens can insert their own agency. Using a speculative case study, Driverless Government, the project imagines the full potential of using digital tools in a city council meeting by mixing the political, digital and physical to create a hybridized and multimodal proposal. The speculative design provocation challenges the current American bureaucratic system by presenting tools that allow citizens to dispute an optimization-led and corporate agenda by envisioning representation in new forms. Specifically, the project imagines how citizens can create artificial intelligence representatives that advocate for themselves and other agents. By imagining, possibilities and responsibilities for the American citizenry are outlined in order to create cities that are for people.

Keywords:

• smart city
• civics
• big data
• industrial Internet of Things
• machine learning
• artificial intelligence
• speculative design
• citizen technology

Notes

Notes

1 Philosophers Francis Bacon and Jeremy Bentham proposed utopias (New Atlantis) and systems of control (panopticon). The industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes predicted future cities dominated by vehicles and roads. Robert Moses reshaped the New York City metropolitan area. Deng Xiaoping’s policy, 4 modernizations, led to the development of Shenzhen, China.

2 Chirag Rabari and Michael Storper, “The Digital Skin of Cities: Urban Theory and Research in the Age of the Sensored and Metered City, Ubiquitous Computing and Big Data,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2014): 2. Available online: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63028/ (accessed January 5, 2019).

3 See GE’s initiative into the smart streetlight domain. Current Powered by GE, “Cities,” 2018, https://www.currentbyge.com/cities (accessed February 23, 2018)

4 Michael Cosgrove et al., “Smarter Cities Series: Introducing the IBM City Operations and Management Solution,” June 10, 2011, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/55e0/c011168f3993f79cdf367980be56b5edb5b7.pdf (accessed November 20, 2017).

5 Ava Kofman, “Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Kiosks Tracking Your Movement,” The Intercept, September 8, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/09/08/linknyc-free-wifi-kiosks (accessed January 5, 2019)

6 Ayona Datta, “New Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial Urbanization’ in Dholera Smart City, Gujarat,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 3 - 22. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820614565748 (accessed January 5, 2019).

7 Gehl Studio SF, “Public Life Diversity Toolkit: A Prototype for Measuring Social Mixing and Economic Integration in Public Space,” Gehl Studio San Francisco, April, 2015, https://gehlinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Gehl_PublicLifeDiversityToolkit_Pages-1.pdf (accessed January 5, 2019).

8 Morgan Currie, interview by Jason Wong, November 20, 2017.

9 Socrata is a private company providing data solutions for federal, state and city governments all across the USA. Socrata, “Data-Driven Innovation of Government Programs,” https://socrata.com/ (accessed January 9, 2018).

10 Ross Arbes and Charles Bethea, “Songdo, South Korea: City of the Future?” The Atlantic, September 27, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/songdo-south-korea-the-city-of-the-future/380849/ (accessed November 13, 2017).

11 Shahid Buttar and Amul Kaila, “LinkNYC Improves Privacy Policy Yet Problems Remain,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, October 4, 2017, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/linknyc-improves-privacy-policy-yet-problems-remain (accessed January 5, 2019).

12 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 239.

13 Keller Easterling, “A Losing Game: Harnessing Failure,” Architectural Review February (2019). Available online: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/a-losing-game-harnessing-failure/10039536.article (accessed May 22, 2019).

14 Rob Kitchin, “Data-driven Urbanism,” in Data and the City, eds. Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault, and Gavin McArdle (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 51.

15 Shannon Mattern, “Methodolatry and the Art of Measure,” Places Journal 65th session, 109th plenary meeting July 19, 2011, (2013): 1–2. Available online: https://doi.org/10.22269/131105 (accessed November 20 2017).

16 Julia Angwin et al., “Machine Bias,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing (accessed November 16, 2017).

17 See Nate Silver’s incorrect 2016 US election prediction. Nate Silver, “2016 Election Forecast,” FiveThirtyEight, November 8, 2016, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ (accessed November 1, 2017).

18 Franco Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 28.

19 Anthony Dunne, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 35.

20 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, advocates of Speculative Design, create products, systems and plausible stories to serve as catalysts to discuss present issues. Their book Speculative Everything is the seminal text in the field of interaction and media design. Ibid.

21 Betti Marenko, “Neo-Animism and Design: A New Paradigm in Object Theory,” Design and Culture 6, no. 2 (2014), 219.

22 Henri Lefebvre’s concept, autogestion, suggests decision-making amongst local actors that disrupts the dominance of the managerial class. See Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013): 141. Available online: http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/jua_rtc.pdf (accessed January 5, 2019).

23 Industry 4.0 and 5 g has created the foundation to allow smart devices to perform machine learning at the edge, thereby giving decision-making capabilities to these devices acting as autonomous actors.

24 Computer vision is a form of machine learning that teaches computers to recognize and identify objects. For further details, see: http://www.vision.caltech.edu/research.html (accessed January 9, 2018)

25 The 2011 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Happiness acknowledges the importance of happiness as a means to achieve the Millenium Development Goals which promote gender, health, education and environmental goals. United Nations General Assembly, Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development, 65/309 (New York: United Nations, 2011). Available online: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/715187/files/A_RES_65_309-EN.pdf (accessed January 5, 2019)

26 Specifically, Driverless Government is influenced by the Dutch Provo movement of the 1960s which developed the white plans. These plans addressed social, health and urban issues in a way that advanced ideas on sharing, housing and transportation. Piet Thoenes, Dutch Sociologist and professor at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, examines the social conditions that created the environment for the Provo movement and the movement’s history. Piet Thoenes, “The Provos of Holland,” Nation 204, no. 16 (1967): 494–497.

27 The information stored on SD cards and thumb drives is similar to the Cuban el paquete semanal (“the weekly package”), which is 1 TB of digital media distributed on hard drives throughout Cuba, bypassing the poor Internet infrastructure and government censors. See https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/(accessed January 5, 2019)

28 For the open source algorithm, see: Andrej Karpathy, “Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM, GRU, RNN) for Character-level Language Models in Torch,” 2016, https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn (accessed March 3, 2018).

29 Sources included Beth Pratt, When Mountain Lions are Neighbors: Wildlife in Today’s California (Berkeley: Heyday, 2016)., Bruce Ratner, Statistical and Machine Learning Data Mining (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011). City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation, Transportation Impact Study Guidelines, 2016. (Los Angeles, CA: City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation Bureau of Planning & Development Services, 2016). and Karma Ura, Sabina Alkire, Tshoki Zangmo, and Karma Wangdi, An Extensive Analysis of GNH Index (Thimpu, Bhutan: The Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2012).

30 Currie, interview by Wong.

31 The physical installation was created as part of my graduate thesis exhibition at ArtCenter College of Design, Jason Wong, “Media Design Practices Thesis Show” (installation, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, April 29, 2018).

32 Saskia Sassen, “Does the City Have Speech?” Public Culture 25, no. 2 (2013): 210. Available online: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2846094 (accessed January 5, 2019).

33 Carl Skelton, “Who’s Your Data?” Places Journal (2013). Available online: https://doi.org/10.22269/130625 (accessed November 20, 2017)

34 Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 173.

35 The Los Angeles Food Oasis app is available online. Food Oasis LA, “Welcome to your Food Oasis, Los Angeles,” Food Oasis LA, https://foodoasis.la/ (accessed November 13, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason Shun Wong

Jason Shun Wong is a designer, researcher and strategist of interactions working in emerging technology. His work focuses on the intersection of smart cities, infrastructure, data, machine learning, networking, behavioral psychology, object-oriented ontology, civics and Chinese science fiction.