Tomorrow's cities: Google's Toronto city built 'from the internet up'
Google seems to be all over the map on this one. I would have thought that minimalism would be a good concept when building to reduce consumption; but rather, Google is going all-out with an enormously large and complex proposal it seems. And it is full of contradictions. It&#x27;s also tone-deaf and reeks of a &#x27;we know better than you&#x27; attitude, which is something Google needs to not fan the flames of.<p>&gt; The area will have plenty of sensors collecting data - from traffic, noise and air quality - and monitoring the performance of the electric grid and waste collection.<p>...<p>&gt; Sidewalk Labs told the BBC that the sensors will not be used to monitor and collect information on citizens, rather it will be used to allow governments to be flexible about how neighbourhoods are used.<p>Those two sentences are not compatible. The sensors will be used to observe - surveil - citizens in cars, citizens talking and at the same time, won&#x27;t be used to monitor or collect information about citizens? How?<p>Does Google have any plans to describe how they will eliminate human-spoken conversations from their noise detection? Such work can be done. Will they do it? That seems like Problem #1 to address: Google claims they will shove microphones along the streets everywhere but &quot;promise us they won&#x27;t listen to you&quot;........okay? I don&#x27;t buy it for a second. Talk to us about it, at least, and don&#x27;t just say &quot;we promise not to monitor human speech&quot; and leave it at that. This is a hugely important conversation and Google is ignoring it. You can&#x27;t just plaster public space with corporate surveillance tools and then walk around whistling and ignoring the huge social movement against your never-ending privacy invasion.<p>&gt; What is clear is that green will be top of the agenda<p>None of the proposal sounds green to me. The amount of effort that will go into building it seems likely to offset any gains it would save over time through pollution reduction, etc.<p>The entire thing sounds like it would need new factories, new dedicated infrastructure, and none of it is remotely green-sounding. Where will all of this stuff come from? Is it truly better and less pollutant than an old-world, more simple solution might be?<p>I&#x27;m hopeful for Sidewalk Labs. But it seems like the Reddit Redesign to me: making every single obvious mistake that you could make, while the outside world yells at you &quot;please reddit don&#x27;t be digg 2.0! please Google don&#x27;t make a massive dystopian total-surveillance society! please!)