Week 13 Reading Response

In the article How low (power) can you go? the author proposed a very interesting hypothesis for the future of city surveillance. For instance, in terms of transportation, he suggests that there may no longer be signs and specific roads that designated for pedestrian or traffic modes, instead, there will be auto-detections that direct and guide traffic. This reminds me of the Verizon AI Jam that we participated where many groups proposed using AI analysis and platform, our life in the future will be more convenience due to such smart systems that analyze parameters like movements, temperature, heart rate etc. Yet this theory is not convincing to me since machines are not human and they would not make every decision perfectly especially when there are emotional factors included.

I strongly agree with the authors argument about being monitored by everything that appear in the daily life. Privacy then no longer exists and no one would really comfortable being watched every second by machines — except from parties with certain purposes. The game Watch Dog 2 also depicts such situations where the smart city that being built is actually monitoring every individuals behaviors and invading all privacy that people had.

Maybe as designers, we should now give more focus on data safety and privacy rather than putting  so much efforts on training machines and minimizing manual works.

Leave a reply

Skip to toolbar