The history of city planning is littered with failed examples. In America, freeing everyone from the vapors by separating them in the free, open countryside mostly led to people being trapped in their cars in traffic because they had to drive to get anywhere. Demolishing slums and shoving everyone into spacious housing projects mostly led to isolation and ghettoisation. And even the mere act of requiring parking has separated everything with inhospitable parking lots, making it a requirement to drive to do anything.
Arguably the most successful large cities did very well with low amounts of planning; Manhattan's famous grid was literally imaginary roads plotted onto a map, without a care for what would fill in the gaps. Planned cities are like the manicured lawn; they look pretty but they don't really support any actual life. The wilderness is chaotic and messy but it supports incredible biodiversity.
we only know the effect of some of the pieces. we know about the effects of surveillance. of insecure technology, data leaks, etc. in other words, what we do know is that the technology is not ready yet for a smart city to be safe.
but apart from that we don't know how it will work out beyond that. for that we need to experiment. someone needs to participate in that experiment so we can learn from it.
is it time already to experiment now? i don't know. we could wait for the technology to be safer. but do we know what the actual threats are? even that we need to test out.
the discussion continues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475258
turns out there is quite some criticism about the article
Interpreted languages are nice, but compiled languages have enormous advantages, especially when problems are well understood. City planning, the design of public spaces, thoughtful zoning, etc. is like the compiler. If you want an efficient city, you probably don't want it to only run as an interpreter.
Somehow this evokes the depths of American anti-intellectualism for me. "We don't need to understand anything, we can just measure it and then understand it!" without so much as a pause to wonder whether an understanding of the problem might already exist in such a way that it can be incorporated into the design, and further, that if you don't already understand 'it' then there is a good chance that you will end up building a device that measures the wrong things and that you can't change easily.