Queensland, Australia) — Back in 2016, a World Economic Forum contributor wrote an article envisioning life in 2030. That article contained the now infamous headline, “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.”
Many people were, and still are, alarmed by the suggestion that in a mere seven years, we are expected to live in a city where we don’t own anything. It doesn’t simply stop at eradicating home and car ownership. The writer postulated a future where we don’t even own appliances or clothes! Of course, for this future to unfold the way the World Economic Forum envisions, people will have to live in cities. So-called “smart cities”.
Interestingly, they already predict that some people will refuse the “convenience” of living in a smart city.
The writer said this: “My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kinds of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.”
The G20 even have a focus group called the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance. This Alliance is the largest global initiative which is aimed at ensuring the responsible and ethical use of smart city technologies. Yet, in the same article quoted above, the writer shares what is probably on the mind of most people who see the concept of smart cities turning into surveillance cities. She says, “Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”
Think about it: a future where you don’t own anything, you don’t really work because robots and AI do your work and every move, every word, every thought and every dream is monitored. That doesn’t sound like a smart city to me – it sounds like an open-air prison.
But while there has been a lot of attention (and concern) around the concept of smart cit