A 'Smart City' in China Controlled By AI

credit: Techcrunch

Who new an entire smart city actually exist? but it's even more sophisticated than you could possibly think, where infrastructural systems are altered by AI. This may sound futuristic, but one such place can already be found in China.

As reported last year 2016, the government/council of the city of Hangzhou collaborated with Tech giants Alibaba and Foxconn to build the “City Brain” project. The city would be totally or partially run by an AI that absorbed every last drop of data it could get its virtual hands on.

Every single resident in the metropolis was tracked; their activity on social networks, their purchases, their movements, their commutes – everything was uploaded to the AI’s database which then analyses them

Now, as reported by New Scientist, the City brain project has been hailed a great success. Things like traffic congestion, road accidents, and crime are all down.

City Brain isn’t just connected to authorities either, notifying them in case of emergency. It’s also wired up to everyone’s mobile phones, informing them of upcoming road traffic or adverse weather conditions in real-time.

Xian-Sheng Hua, an AI manager at Alibaba, told an audience at the World Summit AI meeting a few weeks back that “in China, people have less concern with privacy, which allows us to move faster.”

Putting the ethics aside for a moment, is it right or wrong?