6. Correct! The focus of these smart buildings is surveillance and optimizing people to their work places
On 8 Jul, 2020 By jeffb With Comments Off on 6. Correct! The focus of these smart buildings is surveillance and optimizing people to their work places
Edge Technologies and Smart City
Our partner and landlord Edge-Technologies consider themselves “a developer of healthy intelligent buildings”. With their supposedly sustainable and climate-neutral construction projects, they combine data collection of the Internet of Things (IoT) and data processing of Big Data in their Smart City architecture. The construction of the building requires huge amounts of cement, rare earths and so on. But machine learning (AI) and cloud computing are supposed to improve the energy footprint and utilization of a building and the productivity of its users. The aim is, for example, to optimize the (human) workplace in such a way that people are less likely to take sick leave.
Together with Google and Microsoft, we are the driving force behind the smart homes and offices. Smart City advocates are striving for a universal collaboration of technology, science, real estate developers and other companies transforming cities through the introduction of IoT and smart technologies. The inhabitants of these cities have little choice but to adopt these technologies. Urban planners and government authorities will be enabled to be more aggressive with transformation programs. It remains open what these transformation processes include, how they affect people and who profits from them. But don’t worry, we have good ideas!
In general, a smart environment can collect an incredible amount of very personal information about us. If everything around us records even the smallest detail and this data is evaluated on a large scale, data protection is hardly possible. Human behavior can thus be analyzed and manipulated on a large scale. This is the ultimate low price for endless comfort and total security!
Edge likes to refer to the planned Smart City Toronto “which was built from the Internet”. Here a smart city district was planned (by Google’s Sidewalk Labs) on the drawing board. The advertising brochures speak of heated sidewalks, traffic lights that adapt to the traffic, better waste sorting, etc. Critics of this project in Toronto consider the collection and use of data to be an advanced form of surveillance capitalism, where the main purpose is to manipulate people in the interests of business. Due to massive criticism, Google abandoned the project in Toronto for the time being. Fortunately, Edge-Technologies will take up the ideas and continue them!