PassW0rd – 11th July 2018

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello, I’m Peter Warren with Password, the technology show that tackles the difficult questions about smart cities, self-driving lorries, and shiny things like brand new electric cars. It’s a world where it’s all change— passwords, websites, future intelligence— understands that oil companies like BP are researching buying electric car fleets, and the taxi company Uber has just announced that along with Alphabet, Google’s parent company, that they will throw money into a £253 million pot to allow Uber to to rent scooters, cycles, and electric bikes from an 18-month-old startup called Lime. It’s now valued at $1 billion. The money’s not in oil anymore. It’s in the fleet and the infrastructure and the information. Lime’s founder, Toby Sun, said the tie-up between Uber and Lime would offer people a greater variety of transportation modes at their fingertips and make it increasingly easy to live without a car. Oh, and yes, if you do have a car, they can be sexy and fun too, as Ian Plummer of AutoTrader magazine points out.

Speaker C: I think petrolheads, as we refer to them, are besotted with cars and the performance of their car, irrespective really of the fuel type of that car. And what’s exciting about electric vehicles in particular is the torque that’s delivered by their engines, which is pretty much immediate. So the acceleration is fantastic. Now, in a world of connected cars, when maybe we’re all connected to our insurance companies who give us a better premium if we’re transmitting data about where we’re driving and how we’re driving, then we may limit our speed limit. And if we’re all autonomous, then we’ll definitely be limiting our speed limit. But, but equally, when we take control of the wheel, we’re not necessarily interested in driving ultra-fast, but we do— as petrolheads, I think there is a desire to see handling and performance of a car in terms of acceleration. So there’s still plenty to be found in an alternative fuel vehicle which will literally fuel the love of the car for many years to come, I think.

Speaker B: So if your electric car can go from nought to 60 miles an hour in 4 seconds, it will burn off all the petrol and diesel cars at the traffic lights and leave them standing. But maybe that mentality is also a thing of the past. Carlo Ratti, the smart cities guru at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, believes our love affair with cars is over.

Speaker A: I’m told that, like, you know, 25 years ago it was cool to get to university with a big flashy car. And today, you know, we’ve got a team of 40, 50 people, and, you know, most of them don’t even own a car anymore. Already today, myself, just to do an experiment on myself a couple of years ago, I decided not to buy a car anymore in the United States and just move by bike, Uber, public transportation, so on. And I think, you know, it works very, very well. And so I think that’s already happening. But you’re right, behavioral change is crucial to all of this.

Speaker B: But then I also have decided that I won’t buy a car because it seems to me that at the moment we’re on the cusp of something and making that decision to buy a car seems to be be a bit foolish until things have settled themselves out. But how have you found that experience then of moving around? Does that mean you have to plan your life better?

Speaker A: No, you know, I think probably I would not have been able to do this, I would say, probably 10 years ago because, you know, even just you need to go sometimes just to the supermarket to shop and, you know, and then you— 10 years ago the only option was to get a taxi and you had to, you know, find a taxi. Everything was much more complicated. But, you know, now if you think about what Uber, Lyft, and similar on-demand services are providing, what all the dockless bikes are providing you. There’s many more mobility options. So what 10 years ago might have been difficult and might have required changes in your lifestyle, today becomes seamless. I would say, you know, my life hasn’t changed at all, and I feel much freer. I don’t need to look for parking anymore, and everything is actually easier.

Speaker B: More importantly, fewer cars and more electric cars means less smog. And that’s something the government says it’s committed to. It’s aiming to bring emissions down to 80% of what they were in 1990 by 2050. And that will save lives. This week, the official report into the death from asthma of Ella Kissi-Debrah showed conclusively that high levels of air pollution around her home in southeast London coincided with her frequent hospital admissions. On the last one, she died, aged 9. That was 5 years ago, and Ella’s mother, with Professor Stephen Holgate, has now presented an authoritative report on the case to the Attorney General. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Ella lived and went to school in a part of London that’s outside the congestion charging zone. And the low emission zone where heavy lorries are restricted. Air pollution that’s dangerous to health and carbon emissions that drive global warming are two of the main spurs to action and investment in electric vehicles. The government’s climate change advisers say carbon emissions from vehicles must be stopped by 2040 if the UK is to achieve its targets for climate protection. That’s why the government has announced that all new-build homes from now on will have charging points built into them, and that they will also be put into lamp posts. That suggests that by then all cars should be fuelled by electricity or hydrogen. That’s not early enough for some. The Campaign for Better Transport says that overall the strategy fails to match the urgency of the situation.. It said new petrol and diesel cars should be banned by 2030, 10 years earlier than the government’s proposals, and criticised the government for saying that it saw a role for hybrids—part electric and carbon-fuelled vehicles. At the University of Salford, the world’s only university engineering course that specialises in this new electric technology, is course leader Dr. Massan-Babaei, And he tells us about the drivers for it.

Speaker D: No pun intended. Main driving force is environmental concern and environmental pollution. So what happened in the past, the industry started to encourage people to shift from petrol to diesel. At that moment, the concern was CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and actually environmental concern. And by this change, changing from petrol to diesel, we did it pretty well actually. So what happened? The environmental condition improved, the ozone layer and all that started to even recover somehow. But we faced with a new problem. So diesel are beneficial, they will give you more mileage per unit of fuel, so producing less CO2. But on the other hand, they are producing more nitrogen oxide and particle, and they are dangerous not only for environment, they are dangerous for human health. So what— there are a lot of research and report available. Then the NOx is actually the main concern for many of the health problem. And what’s happening, the industry and the scientists started to look at for an alternative. So by using the Electrical car, what we are going to do, we are going to bring a cleaner transportation into the public. It’s not like what we can hear in the public that they are zero emission vehicle. Obviously, they are consuming energy and energy coming from somewhere such as power plant, etc. So they are very grid dependent, but we don’t have the emission first of all in the city. And by moving towards the renewable resources more and more these days, we expect to have a cleaner network and we can expect to have a cleaner transport as well. We need to do something to tackle this problem. Based on some scientific evidence and data, hybridization using hybrid vehicle and electrification could be an answer. We cannot say like these are 100% solution. They are grid dependent and we need to work on cleaner grid using more and more renewable energy to get them more beneficial for the environment. Obviously, they will bring more jobs. We will use more expertise in area of battery technology and all that. But the most encouraging point that everybody will think is the health. If we can see by using more electrical vehicles, more hybrid vehicles, we should expect cleaner air. So obviously the public and everybody will start to think to move towards this direction.

Speaker B: And if electric cars are not only powered by clean fuel but also connected to all your favorite music and podcasts, planning your easiest route, and warning you when you approach a speed camera, then they may become become more than just a way to get from A to B. Ian Plummer again.

Speaker C: Many cars today are already Wi-Fi enabled, and they’re also, in terms of the connected car journey, they’re also already sending information back either to the manufacturer or to the retailer or both. They can, when the user obviously agrees to that, provide information to other third parties. That allows those third parties to use wisely, of course, promote their services, their wares if you like, on your journey so that you can actually make use of the nearby restaurant and the offer that’s on at the local shop or the local cinema, in the same way that you may be able to access your work environment, and that’s a data requirement. Those are all opportunities that I think manufacturers are looking at in earnest because they see them as good revenue opportunities to replace the revenue that may have otherwise occurred from the internal combustion engine and its wear and tear parts, which won’t be a source of such revenue in the future.

Speaker B: In a sense, what we’re going to is we’ll be able to swap our technology in and out. I’d noticed with a lot of the sat-navs that they tend to look very, very old when they’re built into a car. Do you think that that’s going to be a trend?

Speaker C: That’s definitely a theme that is already visible in the latest generation of cars and will definitely be a key deciding factor for users in the future. And I think it’s visible in as much as the sat-navs, as you say, of older generation cars already look quite dated, and people in some cases prefer to use their smartphone connected to a cradle in a visible position on their dashboard and so on. As things go forward in the future, you’ve got the likes of Apple CarPlay, which allow you to get into a car, in many cases override, if you like, the existing sat-nav or infotainment equipment in that car and get your drive environment as you like it, and your— maybe your Spotify account or Apple Music, if that’s what you like. So that will be much more relevant to people as they look to converge with their existing devices that they use in a mobile way in their home and so on. And convergence has been a key in the IT industry for a long time, and the car is now definitely part of that journey.

Speaker B: So presumably, you mentioned the Internet of Things, in this new Internet of Things world, we will be connected up to the various things in the Internet of Things in the car and probably controlling them, what, with our mobile phone?

Speaker C: Many car brands have excellent apps that allow you to to control certain functionality of your car from your phone. You can park certain vehicles with your phone. So that’s the beginning of a journey that’s definitely got a long way to go. And I think the Internet of Things will allow you to do a lot that’s useful for you and additional value-added services that could add revenue for manufacturers, but also will save you time. You could already today ask your retailer to diagnose a problem on your car at distance because of these connected services. And in some cases, they’ll be able to repair electronic faults on your car. And since cars are more and more electronic and less mechanical, that will become more and more relevant, and that could avoid timely and costly visits to a workshop.

Speaker B: From the connected car, it’s just a short technological trip to the autonomous or self-driving vehicle. And we’re not at the start of this journey, but more than halfway there already. If you have automatic transmission, a paired smartphone, a sat nav, a parking assistance camera, cruise control, and perhaps one of those black boxes that monitors your driving to keep your insurance premiums down, then your car has already, so to speak, a mind of its own. The next stages to full self-driving capability are already being mapped out, as Mesembe Bay explains.

Speaker D: Autonomous car or also called self-driving, driverless, or robotic vehicles are coming. And what’s happening, usually illustrated like science fiction spacecraft in public, we can see like well-dressed people lounging and working happily in those cars. But actually, the reality is a bit different from what we imagine. I think the classification recommended by Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) will help us to understand this area better. SAE defined the 6 levels of autonomous driving from 0 to 5. So level 0, no automation obviously, and the most of cars we can see in the streets. Even, you know, there is some misunderstanding. The regular cruise control we are using, we should remember that it’s not a like an autonomous feature. It belongs to level 0 because the ability to maintain a speed that the driver sets is not autonomous. It is still up to the driver to change a speed if the car crashes up to a slow-moving car. Then it goes to level 1 autonomous. We can call it hands-on. So the driver and automated system share the control. A good example is like this lane keeping assistance that the system will help us to go back to the lane if we are driving a bit funny. Then we can get to level 2. We can call it hands-off. System will manage both speed and steering under certain conditions such as highway driving. So Tesla Autopilot, Volvo Assistant, and all these things we are hearing these days belong to Level 2 system. Level 3 is the start point of actual autonomy of the car. The concept of autonomy we can imagine. It’s conditional automation. Drivers are still needed in Level 3, but the car is able to completely shift under a safety-critical function, and the control can be shifted to the vehicle, but still human driver must be prepared to respond if needed. When it gets to Level 4, it’s self-driving cars at like most of the condition. It can manage the driving in most the condition unless the weather is so bad or there are some specific limitations. And Level 5 is full autonomous. This refers to a full a fully autonomous system that expects the vehicle performance to equal to a human driver. Actually, what we are now, we are mostly on Level 2, and there are some research and development is happening on Level 3 and Level 4 as well as the, the Level 5. So it seems we’ll have the highest penetration in coming years for Level 2 autonomous car. Level 3 and Level 4 vehicle will probably come into the market over the next 10 years. For fully autonomous car, it’s believed that the number of fully autonomous vehicle Level 5 start to increase around 2025 to 2030, and it will take a decade or two before we reach a fully autonomous fleet actually.

Speaker B: This worries many people, especially since there have now been at least two fatal accidents involving vehicles in self-drive mode. Whose fault is it? For experts like Mark Deem at Cooley, an international law firm that specializes in technology, the questions of liability are becoming quite complex. Mark Deem even argued at our last conference on artificial intelligence that we need a kill switch for all autonomous machines and software. He explained this drastic demand to Passwords Jane Wire.

Speaker E: Yeah, I think it’s necessary because we are seeing an explosion, or potential explosion, within AI of the people that could be found liable or could have liability for the various different components of AI. And unless we’re going to be able to prescribe the parameters, the four square corners of that liability, it is going to be very hard for us to ever really find people who are prepared to buy into sharing that risk, perhaps insurance companies offloading that risk, because the liability will be endless. And it’s critical that we can work out precisely where liability starts and precisely when liability stops, otherwise we find ourselves in the Wild West.

Speaker F: What guidelines exist already? Because we already have, for example, driverless cars on the roads, AIs making making lightning decisions in the City of London, for example, that have huge financial consequences? Who carries the risk for them?

Speaker E: We’re playing a catch-up game at the moment. The rules haven’t been written. They are in the process of being written, and there are certain guidances that are being provided. But we don’t really have a comprehensive framework that exists at the moment. So we’re very much looking at using old laws to deal with new technologies. Now, I’m not saying that’s the wrong way around. I mean, I’m certainly not advocating that the lawyers should dictate precisely where the technology should go. That would lead to a very perverse and skewed view of the world, because we as lawyers are not technologists. And indeed, I believe in serendipity. I believe it’s very important that we allow innovation to take us where it needs to go, and that we as lawyers, to a certain extent, backfill but provide the necessary support. What I’m saying at this stage is we need to have a coherent and comprehensive framework that has been thought through that enables us and the innovators to develop the technology, to harness the growth that is offered by this technology in a safe and stable and an efficient way.

Speaker F: There is a case in Germany where a car that’s not self-driving but was actually in a sort of autonomous mode in cruise control. Unfortunately, the human driver suffered a very devastating stroke, and the car continued driving and killed two other people. So there, that gives you as a lawyer some difficult questions about liability, doesn’t it?

Speaker E: It creates some inevitably very difficult questions and some very troublesome questions. With autonomous vehicles, there is obviously a degree to which the vehicle genuinely has autonomy, and that obviously is going play into the question of liability. There’s also the question of human perception. To what extent does the human who is in the car believe that they can take control or want to take control? Now obviously in that instance it would have been very difficult for the individual to take control, but unless we have some guidance, unless we have a framework that’s laid down which deals with precisely these sort of issues, effectively what we’re going to end up with is a claim and a counterclaim and and a series of legal debates as to precisely where this is. And that’s not really going to advance the technology or enable the technology to advance. That just creates a series of litigation which could take a lot of time and cost a lot of money.

Speaker F: Who should make these laws? Should it be national governments? Surely everything’s pretty much transnational these days.

Speaker E: It is transnational. One of the biggest transnational bodies of law, if you like, is the rule of law itself. Itself, the concept that we as people agree to abide by certain standards, certain behaviors, certain laws. That’s not to say those laws are fixed. That’s not to say those laws can’t flex, but we are nevertheless bound and agree to be bound by that rule of law. Now, that’s important because if we agree to that rule of law, we have to work out, is it possible for us to hardwire those ideals, those concepts into any AI. And to my mind, I think that’s very difficult to do because any AI is created at a point in time, and at that point of time, the state of the laws in various different countries may be very different from where it might be in 10, 15 years’ time once that AI has developed by processing data and the algorithm has processed further information to create different outputs.

Speaker F: But that’s just like saying Magna Carta is no longer relevant, you know, because we drive around in cars. Actually, rights are rights, aren’t they? Aren’t they inalienable, whatever happens, whatever new technology comes along?

Speaker E: To a certain extent. I mean, obviously we’ve moved on a long way from the divine right of kings, and we’ve now moved into a situation where nobody is above the law. And so it’s very important, and you would expect a lawyer to say this perhaps, that we protect that body of law, that rule of law, that adherence to that law. It is very difficult though, because what that also means is that we are not able to give give away more than we have ourselves. There’s a Latin maxim, delegatus non potest delegare— you can’t delegate more than you have yourself. And I would suggest that probably extends into the creation of AIs. Is it possible for us to give to that AI greater rights than we ourselves have?

Speaker F: Haven’t we already done that?

Speaker E: We may have given some rights away, but I would say that we have never and should never give away the obligations or of the responsibility that necessarily flows from those rights we may have given away.

Speaker B: Mark Deem from Cooley. And for transparency, I should say that Cooley represents Google and a number of other high-tech companies. We’ll be tackling all these tricky questions in greater detail at our next AI conference in London on the 3rd of October. So you might want to save the date. Legal liability, as Mark Deem says, is something of a moot point for lawyers when it comes to self-driving vehicles. So where does that leave the insurance industry? And how can you even get insurance if a lump of metal is to blame for the accident? The best person to answer those questions is Sarah Cordy of the Association of British Insurers.

Speaker G: In the truly automated vehicles of the future, you might question whether there would even be such a thing as brake pedals and a steering wheel. Because potentially if they’re designed to do the whole task, they wouldn’t envisage a point at which a human would be needed to intervene, and that potential might not even be there. How the vehicles respond if a person is needed and is not available is another one of the things we’re concerned about. There are some vehicles where at certain points they will require a driver to take back control, and if that driver doesn’t respond after a certain time, that vehicle will essentially come to a stop. Stop wherever it is, and of course that could be somewhere very dangerous, and insurers are looking to vehicle manufacturers to address that, for example, by ensuring that a vehicle will first find itself a safe harbour or a safe place to stop before it becomes immobile. So there’s an awful lot of details here that insurers have really been getting into to try and help shape things for the future and make them as safe as possible.

Speaker B: Well, that’s a big issue, isn’t it, because in the event of you being left somewhere you don’t want by a car and you weren’t really involved in the decision, then the liability for that is where? Precisely.

Speaker G: I mean, certainly liability issues are a big one to sort out. If a vehicle with a lot of smart technology on board is involved in a collision with another vehicle, how do you decide if it is the driver that’s to blame or if in fact it is the technology that’s on board that vehicle? And for that reason, insurers in the UK have been trying to influence the the international system that looks at how data is collected and managed from vehicles, because we feel you need to have a core set of data available not only to insurers but also to the emergency services, for example, so that in the instance of a severe accident you can quite easily find out what sort of mode was the vehicle in, when did the driver last engage, had the driver followed all the necessary prompts that they should, was the vehicle complying with the road laws at the time. To try and narrow down whether it was vehicle fault or driver fault, because those are going to eventually be very different things. I think what insurers don’t want to see is there to be a very complicated claim in the future that can then only be solved by a drawn-out legal process, and for that reason the insurance industry over here has been working with the Department for Transport in proposing a model of insurance for the phase we’re approaching now where we have a mix of manual cars and highly assisted cars, cars sharing the same road. And we’ve made a case for a model of insurance which is very similar to the one that we have now, but which allows insurers to then go looking to vehicle manufacturers for recompense if an accident turns out to have been the fault of the vehicle involved rather than the driver.

Speaker B: You would be absolutely in a situation where you could either elect to have controls or not have controls, and if you do elect to have controls or any degree of interference with the control of vehicle, then obviously you’re going to start carrying insurance because you will need that for that role.

Speaker G: Some of this is going to come down, I think, to what the vehicle manufacturers choose to offer, and indeed whether the vehicles that we have now that we own individually— actually, automated pods might not be things you own, they might be actually a future form of public transport. So there are a lot of very wide-ranging questions, I think, behind that question that you ask, and it will have a lot to do with the business models of the vehicle manufacturers and what sort service people are buying into that will come down to how they control the vehicle that they’re in and who ends up being responsible for it.

Speaker B: The Insurers Association works with the Thatcham crash test research laboratory so that questions of blame, liability, and responsibility can keep up with technological innovation. It’s the transition periods that are difficult, both in the individual vehicle when the driver takes back control And in the bigger picture, when we have a society with some drivers in fully manual mode and others with varying degrees of autonomy. This is Password with Peter Warren, talking about the future of transport and the smart city. After this, here on Resonance FM, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. We tried to get the views of a number of political parties on this, And perhaps not surprisingly, the only ones who want to talk in depth were the Green Party. Here’s Green Party politician Caroline Russell, a member of the London Assembly, who shares the insurers’ view that smart cars and self-driving machines are going to be safer than even the most careful human driver because they can pool data on drivers’ behaviour can tell whether you are drunk or tired at the wheel of a vehicle.

Speaker F: That kind of thing is actually potentially has public purpose, you know, written into it, because if we can eliminate driver error by making sure that a car doesn’t work if the driver is drunk, or that if a driver is tired that they are woken by their car car in some way, or if they are driving faster than the speed limit on a particular road, which I’m quite sure every car maker is capable of, you know, putting that kind of technology in, that could reduce insurance premiums. It could mean that drivers would be properly incentivized to stick to the rules. And, you know, also if drivers are braking very suddenly and accelerating a lot, then that kind of driving— driver behaviour, if the car is reporting that, then that is behaviour that is more risky, and so therefore the insurance premium for someone who’s driving in that way should go up. So if you take a road danger reduction approach and write that into the future of car development, then you could use this technology for good. On the other hand, you know, if you’re using the technology to warn people where the speed cameras are so that they can speed where there’s no cameras and not where there are, then, you know, that’s completely defeating the purpose of, you know, what this technology is capable of.

Speaker B: One of the issues that we have seen though is that with Cambridge Analytica, for example, there evidently needs to be some controls over what companies companies are doing. There should not be a data free-for-all.

Speaker F: Certainly, but I mean, as someone who got into politics campaigning on road danger reduction and trying to stop people being killed on the road, so I think that, you know, some of the data that can be harvested from a car and the way that it is driven is actually data that could be used, you know, through a mechanism of insurance premiums to make people drive in a better and safer way, which would be, you know, that would be good if it saved the country the cost of death and serious injury that comes from road traffic collisions, then that would be a properly useful thing.

Speaker B: In the United States, things are moving a little faster. The University of Illinois has done an experiment with autonomous trucks claiming to prove that even just one circulating around a ring road, the equivalent of the M25, can prevent traffic jams. It is especially good at dealing with those phantom slowdowns that start when one driver brakes too suddenly and all the rest for miles behind are forced to follow suit. The theory is that self-driving trucks anticipate better and are never distracted, so they brake smoothly in plenty of time. You can watch it on YouTube or read about it in the technology review published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s this potential to free our roads and cities from traffic jams that makes autonomous vehicles a key component in the concept of the smart city. In theory, they will eliminate the wasted time, cost to business, personal stress, and pollution they cause. They can collect, transmit, and share data about who and what is on the road, unexpected hazards, weather conditions, who’s driving erratically, and so on. For Caroline Russell, this data harvesting looks promising, but she wants people living in the city to have a say in how it’s used.

Speaker F: I think there should be constant dialogue about our future plans for our city. I think here in London, there is some pretty good dialogue. We’ve just— we’re at the stage in the mayoral cycle where we’ve got a new mayor who’s 2 years into his term. He’s been consulting enormously on all the strategies, all the mayoral strategies for how decision-making and delivery happens in London. And so actually, I think there’s been quite a lot of space for dialogue. I do think though that technology, it’s a bit like with the Electoral Commission sort of being an analogue commission for digital election campaigns and it’s just not got the powers that it needs. I think in the same way, we have huge, huge changes in technology And our processes for city governance are just way behind. So we saw with Uber, you know, this— the regulation wasn’t right. We’ve had, you know, a sort of flooding of our streets with more and more vehicles signed up as driving on the Uber platform, which has added to congestion. It’s also totally disrupted the public transport market. If you’ve got a group of 3 or 4 people out in the evening, it’s cheaper and an awful lot more convenient to get door-to-door transport via Uber than it is to go and stand at the bus stop, wait for the night bus, and travel home. So the costs of services like Uber, the costs to society in terms of congestion, and, you know, it seems that a lot of those drivers are driving very long hours and involved in quite a lot of collisions, which is also bad for the city. You know, those externalities are not being kind of taken on board, and the people providing those services aren’t paying for them. We’ve had another example just now where Urbo, one of the dockless bike companies, is pulling out of Waltham Forest. Well, the dockless bike system is enabled by technology, and it’s great because it means without, you know, private companies are investing in all these cheap hire bikes which people can just get an app and download and use, but the control and the planning is completely random. It’s just down to these companies who are running these dockless bike companies rather than being down to any kind of planning between the Mayor’s office and the boroughs to make sure that we have a good service and something that actually works for Londoners. And the risk is that you end up with lots and lots of dockless bikes in the centre of of London where we’ve already got the Mayor’s kind of, you know, totally gold-plated system of hire bikes, and we don’t get the expansion that’s needed out into outer London where there’s a huge amount of potential for cycling, but just not enough cycling happening.

Speaker B: This is the issue, isn’t it? Because essentially there doesn’t seem to be a policy, there doesn’t seem to be a strategy, and as you say, this thing is being done on a piecemeal basis and companies have been allowed to develop it. One of the things about the smart city is that companies seem to be cherry-picking the development of the smart cities. Do you think that there is a need for a much more coordinated policy?

Speaker F: Well, certainly from where I’m looking at it, sort of looking at transport issues and the two examples of Uber and then dockless bikes, it certainly seems that we need to have public purpose at the heart of smart city development, and just leaving it to the market and a sort of wild west of, you know, which company is going to come in and develop and do this or that is, you know, is not actually going to deliver for all Londoners or for all citizens in whatever city you’re talking about. So yeah, I mean, putting— making sure that there is public purpose at the heart of it is absolutely crucial. The other thing is, you know, it’s great when you have small companies innovating and developing technology, and you’ve got to have a way to build on that enthusiasm of new kind of pioneering companies. But you’ve got to make sure that the sort of regulatory system is actually looking after the interests of the city. So, for instance, Transport for London have been brilliant about giving out loads of data for innovators to use, and, you know, they’ve produced lots of apps like Citymapper which allow you to plan journeys, and, you know, and that’s all fantastic and really convenient for Londoners. But actually, if Transport for London were getting some of that data back from the companies that they’re giving their data to, then you would start to see the potential for Transport for London to be planning properly for the future because they would be getting more information and understanding in an anonymised way, you know, the nature of people’s journeys around the city. So I think, you know, we need to make sure that the Mayor is really looking out for the interests of London and Londoners, and not just sort of sleepwalking into a new world where big companies are sort of taking a smart cities approach and actually making changes to our streets and to the nature of our public spaces in our city and our transport systems without actually thinking about what’s good for Londoners, rather than just what’s good good for the company that’s doing the work.

Speaker B: For the latest thinking on smart cities, we need to hear more from the world’s leading guru, Carlo Ratti, architect and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speaker A: I think, you know, the city of the future is not something that’s written in stone that we can try to predict. You know, the city of the future is what we will build together. You know, the city of the future will depend on a lot of the choices we will we make today as citizens, as governments, and so on. And that will decide what type of places we will live in. At the same time, I think something quite interesting is happening today in cities. And I think that’s why we got so much excitement. Some people call it smart city. I don’t particularly like the term. We like to call it sensible city to focus a bit more on the human and sensible side of things. But what is happening is really that the The internet is becoming the internet of things, and as such is changing many dimensions of urban life. And if you think about many innovations we have in cities today, anything from Uber, Lyft, Nest thermostat, and so on, all of these are part of this internet of things condition. And if you look forward, many more dimensions of urban life are going to be changed.

Speaker B: So in a sense then, that city of the future that you’re talking about, this smart city that people are talking about, it isn’t that we demolish everything, start again a bit like Corbusier, and come up with some electronic wonder city. What it is is a virtual city. It’s this virtual connectivity that we’re going to start putting into our lives. Yeah, totally.

Speaker A: You know, if you think about technologies, it’s always transformed cities. If you think about the 20th century, where the automobile and many other technological innovations really changed the way we did city planning. But that, you know, didn’t mean demolishing all cities. And furthermore, I think today’s technologies, technologies of the internet, of internet of things, you know, digital technologies can really adapt to existing urban form in a much better way than technologies of the 20th century. So it’s certainly not about changing too much the physical form of the city. It’s really about changing not the hardware but the software.

Speaker B: I mean, Corbusier is a good thing to talk about, isn’t it? Because Corbusier, at the beginning of the 20th century, he seemed to think that all cities should be planned for the motor car. What’s interesting now though is that the car is becoming less important, isn’t it? In fact, in some cities like Helsinki, for example, They want to ban the car from the city and just have improved public transport. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: And actually, and by the way, mobility is one of the things that’s going to change a lot in the, in the next few years, exactly because of what we were saying, because of IoT, Internet of Things. You know, think about new developments such as autonomous cars. The interesting thing about autonomous cars is that you don’t need to own a car anymore. You just get one when you need it. And also today a car is used on average 5% of the time. 95% of the time, not only is it not used, but actually it uses valuable space in our cities. So if you can change a little bit those percentages, the impact for instance on parking spaces in cities could be massive. Or think about other changes with mobility, you know, what’s happening, what are called the dockless city bikes that are now in cities all over the world. Think about some of the recent experiments we are seeing with on-demand scooters, electric scooters, and so on. So there are just some examples of how Internet of Things is changing the mobility landscape. And you know what? When mobility gives us more opportunities, then the important thing is what type of quality of life do we want to achieve? And when you look at that, of course, you want to see a city that’s built less for the motor car and more for citizens and lovers, as Louis Manfort used to say.

Speaker B: In the cityscape of the future, if planners can make Carlo Ratti’s vision come true, there may be fewer cars and more space. Many of our modern cities were designed for cars, something that the world-famous architect Le Corbusier demonstrated with Chandigarh in India and Oscar Niemeyer with the Brazilian federal capital Brasília. But they aren’t people-friendly. Something that Brits are also experiencing in Milton Keynes and other new towns. Prioritising cars is not especially good for humans, and we don’t like the result. People have voted with their feet and deserted these places made for cars. And since, as Carlo Ratti points out, cars are only in use for 5% of the time, They are literally a waste of space. London Assembly member Caroline Russell again.

Speaker F: If you do what we’ve done in this country, which is to build more and more car-dependent housing, more and more car-dependent shopping centres, you just end up creating congestion and traffic jams and danger, and streets that are unpleasant places to live and unpleasant places places to be because of the traffic pollution and noise and danger. And so you end up with a community where huge amounts of money are invested in these cars that sit, you know, taking up parking space on our streets, which is also a public disbenefit, used fairly seldom, particularly people living in cities, you know, very often use their car once a fortnight, maybe once a month, and it’s usually to get out of London rather than to make local journeys, because local journeys are much, much more easily made on public transport and by bike or on foot. And so if you’re sort of thinking about what kind of places people want to live in, they want to live in places where streets are quiet, not filled with traffic, not filled with traffic noise, not filled with pollution. So It’s, you know, the idea of, you know, that the car companies have been trying to sell us of, you know, the freedom of car ownership. Actually, that really doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to people living in cities now, and it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to, particularly to young people. And so certainly a future where cars are owned collectively, so, you know, where you book a car and you sort of see car use as a service for when using public transport or using a bike isn’t going to work is, you know, absolutely that’s the future of car use. And I sincerely hope we get to a point where our roads are far, far less cluttered with parked cars. And if we got rid of all the parked cars and we had, you know, car clubs for collective use, and they could all be electric, so they’d be the least polluting version of a car. You could then have an awful lot of space that could be given over to providing protected cycle lanes, so that people would feel fine about cycling with their kids to school, and cycling to the local shops, and, you know, making those local journeys by bike. And you could then get into a virtuous circle where you had a population that’s taking more physical activity, so that would sort of start help dealing with the health and obesity crisis. You’d have streets and places that are nicer to be, you’d be reducing the carbon footprint from the overall transport system, and you could actually invest in, you know, very good public transport that works for communities, you know, at all times of day and provides the convenience and mobility mobility that people actually want.

Speaker B: It’s a very good point, isn’t it? In Helsinki, they’ve realized that they actually have more parking spaces than they have spaces for children to play in, and so they’ve decided to reverse that. And as you said, BP calculated that we only— that on average, we only use our cars 5% of the time.

Speaker F: Yeah, they’re parked. Yeah, just taking up space and actually costing society. They cost society in terms of lack of opportunity for children to play and run. And, you know, it’s space that could be used for other things, and we’ve given it over to storing cars just without stopping to think about it. And, you know, every time a road is widened, it’s only— it’s basically just providing more car storage space, because the way that traffic flows is governed by the junctions, and if the junctions in the cities don’t actually change because, you know, there are buildings in the way so they can’t, then these extra wide roads are just creating extra traffic. You know, they’re just more car storage space for moving cars, but they’ve still got to funnel into the pinch points as they enter cities or villages or towns along the way. So we really have to think about what we want for the future, and if we want to have, you know, healthy populations who are taking enough physical activity, who are breathing clean air, then actually changing, fundamentally changing, our transport system so that walking, cycling, and public transport are the priorities and the complete default go-to options, and car use is something that is by exception, is possible, you know, for someone who has mobility issues, or for someone who’s wanting to carry something that’s particularly big. But actually, it really, it shouldn’t be the default that every citizen aspires to own a car once they turn 18, because actually that just, it just doesn’t work. You know, the model doesn’t work, although obviously the car manufacturers would love us to keep buying cars.

Speaker B: So in a sense, what you’re saying is that whereas you have a city like Brasília, for example, which was designed expressly for the car, you’re saying that in the smart city of the future, that we really should actually think very much about the role that cars play.

Speaker F: Yes, I mean, I think, you know, a smart city, a truly smart city, has fantastic fantastic, well-connected public transport, really good walking and cycling, and then an availability of car club cars for people to use if they want to have that kind of personalized door-to-door service, if they’ve got, you know, if there are particular circumstances. But the idea of, you know, private car ownership in cities, you know, I suspect in 20, 30 years’ time people are going to look at it and think, what were we doing? You know, it, it’s just extraordinary. And our, our cities could be so much better without being clogged up with cars.

Speaker B: But Carlo Ratti says the same forces that are driving electric and autonomous cars might actually have the opposite effect and result in cities with even more traffic jams. It could go either way?

Speaker A: Actually, we could, especially with electrification. The good thing is that, you know, electrification now is proceeding at a fast pace. For the first time, I think last year, the cost of producing energy in a sustainable way using photovoltaics became the cheapest of all energy sources in a few countries. We are talking about $20, $25 per megawatt-hour. So I think if you play it right, we could have a city with more electric cars, with less vehicles overall because we use them better by sharing them. So potentially, yes, a more quieter city. But again, it’s our decision. I’m going to give you another example where we might get a city that’s even more congested and noisy. And that’s, you know, that for instance, if self-driving cars are going to be so cheap that people don’t want to use mass transportation anymore, then we might end up with many more vehicles on the road and we’re much more congested. And again, you know, technology means we’ve got more opportunities. It’s up to us to decide what type of city we want to live in tomorrow.

Speaker B: But that’s one of the interesting things, isn’t it? Because you say it’s up to us. Well, where do we go to vote for that sort of city? Where does that decision get made? It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any place to actually manifest your view on this at the moment.

Speaker A: Well, I think there is, but let me tell you, this is not something that, you know, this is something we all need to do together. For instance, what we try to do both at MIT, at Senseable City Lab, our lab at MIT, also with our design office, Carlo Ratti Associati, what we try to do is do projects that can show different dimensions of how cities could be tomorrow. And that’s the first step in order to start a conversation. You know, the conversation, I think the discussion we are having now, you know, it’s really Through media, you know, a lot of people will get exposed to new ideas about the city and form their opinion. And then ultimately, you know, it’s also up to us how we vote for politicians in order to vote for a vision of the city tomorrow or a different one, more cars or less cars, or, you know, how we use also traditional methods, which are politics, in order to decide what type of city we want.

Speaker B: But we don’t actually see technology being we don’t put on manifestos at the moment, do we? We don’t see politicians saying, I’m standing on a platform of bringing in a much, much nicer city for people to live in.

Speaker A: Well, I think we are. For instance, if you think about, you know, the mayor of Paris, we’ve been working closely with her over the past few years, you know, and when she decided to ban diesel engines, that, you know, was a very strong political decision in the same way as the decision in Paris to close down a lot of the urban highways next to the river, that was a very strong political decision. So citizens then are going to decide if they want to reelect her because of this or if they want to vote for somebody else. So I see that these changes were really crucial to what a city is. A city is something that for 10,000 years ago has been bringing us together as citizens to exchange ideas, to exchange goods, and so on. So, you know, this very idea of the city, I see it’s more and more part of the political agenda.

Speaker B: But that can go either way too. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has seen her popularity drop by 10% since she started greening the city, according to an opinion poll published in March by the IFOP polling company. And when we add smart buildings and smart highways to the vehicles driving around, Don’t we find that the data they are gathering is a serious threat to our personal privacy?

Speaker A: Really, I mean, the city doesn’t need to know it. You need to know it and let your, maybe your home know it. And I think, you know, the problem with data is a very big issue today, and, but it’s not about cities, it’s really a broader issue. So again, you know, if you think about all we’ve been talking about so far, all the data can be just managed locally. Unfortunately, in most cases, that’s not the case. Because the people who are running the platform and the infrastructure like to collect large amounts of data. And that’s the same, you know, what’s happening with our smartphones. Today, you know, if you got a smartphone, your location is captured many thousand times every day, as well as information about where you are, what you’re doing, how you’re moving, by bike, by foot, by car, and so on. And all this information is collected today. So to me, the key issue today is not about, you know, yes, we need data to run a smart city, or we need data to run our technological lives. I think the key issue today is that, you know, this data is not evenly distributed, that actually some people are collecting massive amounts of data, and we know very little about them. Right.

Speaker B: So what you’re saying is we can run this if we actually run it and we’re in control of our data, and that I mean, it’s a very interesting point that you make about the data being distributed unequally. It seems to be in particular places. This was a point that was picked up by the House of Lords Select Committee where they were saying that these very, very large companies having data gives them an unfair advantage in developing artificial intelligence. Absolutely.

Speaker A: I think, I think there’s two issues here. One is just, you know, that point is more like the point an economist would make. It’s basically what you’re doing, you are creating monopolies. Monopolies because of data. Traditional legislation is about anti-monopolies, but looks at, usually look at this from a traditional 20th century point of view. When you look at data, everything becomes more subtle. So one point is about monopolies, but I think there’s something more profound, which is who has the right to know? All this information, you know, how can we make sure we live in a world that’s more symmetrical? Again, today, you know, there’s a few big companies and big states, they know everything about us, but we know very little about them. And I think that’s a big issue.

Speaker B: Okay, final question then. The smart building. The smart building. I’ve gone into several buildings recently where the lift will only let me get off at certain floors. My process and progress around that smart building is curtailed according to who I am, and also increasingly that data on my smartphone will also condition that. Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?

Speaker A: If I may say, I fear that some of those buildings you’re describing were not really smart, they were more like dumb buildings we’ve been in. I mean, what the interesting thing is that, you know, yes, the elevators are not very efficient, so you can create more efficient ways of using the elevator from the beginning. You tell where you want to get off, you tell the floor, and the elevator has a little system of very basic intelligence in order to pull people around the same elevator. So, you know, you save a little bit of energy with it. But I think, you know, the big changes we’ll see a few years from now, elevators are being disrupted by a new technology that’s being developed actually in Germany. That’s an elevator where the same shaft can have multiple cabins. And when you look at that, it’s almost like a little, like a vertical train. Then when you do that, and again, you know, if you say where you’re starting, where you want to go, there you can really have major efficiencies in the way you manage horizontal and vertical transportation. But I think, you know, the smart building is not really— sometimes people say smart building for something that’s really not necessarily very smart. I think, however, the potential is there. And the potential is again to have buildings that respond to us better. And save energy. What you could say is that architecture has often been described as kind of a third skin. We’ve got our own skin, and then the skin of our clothes, and then architecture. But as a skin, it’s always been quite uncompromising. I would say almost like a corset. Now, I think with new technologies we’ll be able to have architecture as something much more fluid and responsive. I would say, you know, something really like a skin that responds better to our needs and desires.

Speaker B: Tomorrow, as Carlo Ratti says, we might have cities built for lovers, buildings like a third skin, and everything cleaner and greener. The London borough of Lewisham might seem an unlikely place to start. It’s a far cry from Chandigarh and Brasilia. But it is where that little girl, Ella Kissy Deborah, lived and died at the age of 9. As we now know for sure since the Holgate Report, she died of an asthma attack caused by spikes in the air pollution. Unconnected to that report but welcome nonetheless, Lewisham Council has published an online streets map and is inviting residents and businesses to put pin in the map and suggest an improvement. Anything from a dropped curb or a new cycle lane to a whole new street design. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has held an Unconference at City Hall to gather ideas. And across Europe, with at least 70 local groups in the UK, citizen scientists are building their own air quality sensors and and uploading data about chemicals and particles in the air they breathe. It’s coordinated by the Open Knowledge Network, or OK Labs as they’re known, and the data they collect could help to shape new urban environments. That’s all from me in this month’s edition of Password. You can find out more about technology and society at our website Future Intelligence and sign up for our newsletter. In line with the General Data Protection Regulations, we’ll keep your personal details safe. Password was written by Jane Wyatt, produced by Blue Buffery, presented by Peter Warren, and we’ll be back with a new edition in September.

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