Thoughts from Smart Cities 2024

John attended and presented at Smart Cities Week Aotearoa, Auckland in May and then again at Smart Cities APAC, Adelaide in August 2024. He shared ViaStrada's and Countculture's experience in monitoring walking, scooting and cycling traffic, developing monitoring plans, and data uses (design, public information, business cases). 

John writes:

• I was one of the few transportation professionals at the conference, but many of the speakers were talking about transportation use cases for their tech.
• As someone who grew up with the Terminator movie series, I have a pathological suspicion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, transportation professionals will either be put out of work or earn less if they don’t learn how to use AI.
• “Edge AI” doesn’t mean artificial intelligence at the edge of technology, it means AI embedded within the point of data collection rather than on the server that receives the data. Within a year, AI will be running at the edge AND on the servers and the power of this tech is mind-boggling. 
• AI surveillance: would you trade off some personal liberties if it meant improved public safety and defeating terrorism? The benefits appear to outweigh the risks, but only if we put in place robust ethical guardrails (link to UNESCO).
• The big tech failure last month that stranded millions of people at airports and in supermarkets around the world is a stark warning. Critical organisations in the English-speaking world are moving quickly to adopt the US Department of Defense “Zero Trust” framework. This should help protect our modern way of life (for better or worse!).
• Given war and climate change (almost certainly linked), one survey shows 96% of youth are pessimistic about the future. RethinkX presented a more positive prediction based on “cost curves”:
  • as prices for green tech go down, legacy industries (fossil fuels, traditional agriculture, internal combustion vehicles) will disappear quite rapidly. 
  • The speaker presented some thought-provoking ideas about the disruption of transportation – we have some scepticism about some predictions but overall it’s worth a look at the video.
  • One of the big moves is in Precision Fermentation – which isn’t about beer but rather synthetic food production. And it doesn’t look or taste like the grub envisioned on the hit show Snowpiercer, thankfully! Aside from totally undermining the huge NZ dairy industry, this tech could partly address the loss of productive farmland due to suburban sprawl (link to the University of Canterbury). However, we still think it would be better to grow up rather than out for good transportation planning reasons (link to VTPI).