Description
Smart city initiatives are obsessed with measuring urban spaces, that is: translating objects and activities into numbers, often with the help of sensors. While the contemporary discussion tends to focus on the “smartness” of the systems, their capability of automated decision-making, I would like to raise the awareness of the mundane and more fundamental acts of counting and measuring urban spaces.If I am not mistaken in understanding “machine learning” as a novel way of counting and measuring, there are, at least, two implications:
(1) In general, we may have to be careful regarding the current focus in the philosophical discussion on automated decision-making.
(2) We may get a better idea, why municipalities (and other political institutions) are attracted to the idea of the smart city: There is not so much of a difference between traditional ways of counting and measuring cities and the new way to translate urban spaces into numbers by digital means.
| Period | 29 Nov 2022 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of Hamburg, Germany |
| Degree of Recognition | International |