Nice article about Toronto moving away from a 'surveillance capitalism' solution for city development

The Guardian — Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

Interesting also from another perspective, the limits of machine logic:

“The idea of a smart city sounds really nice. It’s new, it’s innovative and it’s world-leading. It promises to make hard problems simpler and easier and faster to solve,” said Shoshanna Saxe, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto. “But when you dig into the details of these pitches, they really tend not to work very well.”

and

“We’re often easily distracted by the idea of something new and flashy, but then we learn it’s quite hard to deliver on those promises,” she said. “And while we’re chasing something flashy, the problems become more entrenched and it becomes harder to deal with them.”

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Nice! There was a big HN discussion at the time Google abandoned the smart city project, with a lot of (i.e. 304) interesting comments: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto | Hacker News

The current article was entered on HN an hour ago… let’s see what people have to say about it: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision | Hacker News