Abstract
Cities, such as industry or the universities, are immersed in a process of digital transformation generated by the possibility and technological convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and its consequences: hyperconnectivity, datafication and algorithmization. A process of transformation towards what has come to be called as Smart Cities. The aim of this paper is to show the impacts and consequences of digital connectivity, algorithmization and the datafication of urban digital society to outline possible ways of resolving the underlying moral conflicts.
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Notes
For further information on the application of KET in smart cities, see Obaidat and Nicopolitidis (2015).
By digitally hyperconnected citizens, we understand all the elements of society which, through devices, software or sensors, are included in nested networks of constant, mass data exchange.
Translated by Simon Berrill.
This surveillance programme is intended to install 600 million cameras and sensors in streets, buildings and means of public transport connected to a face recognition program based on AI and Big Data analysis to detect uncivilised, improper or criminal behaviour among citizens and to supply information in real time to the so-called Good Citizen Card, which gives or blocks access to civil service jobs or State aid, among other things. As Qiang argues 2019, p. 56), “In 2017, it was reported on CCTV that the “Skynet” project had been completed, bringing into being the largest video-surveillance network in the world. By that year, China’s network included 176 million surveillance cameras, and there were plans to increase this number to a staggering 626 million by the decade’s close. The network’s many AI-equipped cameras monitor the gender, clothing, and height of passersby, transforming the information captured on screen into data”.
At the moment, the existence of this demand is known in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, in eastern China (Yijiang 2019).
As The Guardian has pointed out, the gig economy has doubled in Great Britain during the last year (Partington 2019).
The supporters of the use of this type of predictive surveillance tool based on automatic learning argue that there are correlations between the structure of the urban environment and the distribution of crime, while the critics claim that the data on which this is based is hardly ever objective (Barbieri 2019).
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Acknowledgements
This study is part of the Scientific Research and Technological Development Project FFI2016-76753- C2-2-P, financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, and the Scientific Research Project UJI-A2016-04, financed by Universitat Jaume I. Besides, I am sincerely grateful for the contributions of the reviewers that have enriched this article. They have helped me to improve it considerably.
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Calvo, P. The ethics of Smart City (EoSC): moral implications of hyperconnectivity, algorithmization and the datafication of urban digital society. Ethics Inf Technol 22, 141–149 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09523-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09523-0