Could Adam Smith Live in a Smart City?

Abstract

In this paper we look at how Smart Cities can accelerate trends in society initiated by the information economy that run counter to traditional western norms. These include the right to privacy, reliance on trust (whether personal or institutional) and emphasis on individual rights, potentially going as far as weakening legal principles such as the presumption of innocence. We investigate the contribution of behavioral science in reinforcing these trends. We look at how such societal norms are transmitted through both economic and ethical frameworks such that the transparency championed by the information economy affects everything from the wealth divide to our attitude toward consequentialist and data-driven decision making. We see that transparency and surveillance can disrupt the process by which we build trust, learn right from wrong and develop as individuals who can then contribute to a pluralistic society. We explain the existence of feedback loops that exacerbate the replacement of trust with assurance and look at the potential for misuse of surveillance, particularly when combined with social media and behavioral science. We conclude that making such rapid changes to our societal norms risks upsetting the cooperative balance we have evolved between the needs of the individual and the collective and that we need to slow down in order to allow a more extensive public discussion about how this technology is implemented and whether current legislation is adequately protecting the principles that are most important to us.