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Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

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Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#11

Post by Endy »

ilaksh wrote: post #4

To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance. If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval. What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects. But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever sp…

There is no difference between those last two things. Every time someone talks about a Smart City, I keep thinking back to the horrifying Secret Project video from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - "The Self-Aware Colony". That's what I fear life will be like in a "Smart City".

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#12

Post by Waterluvian »

Canada is like this little brother always in America's big shadow. One thing we don't talk about as much is how we have this recurring fear that big American corporations think, "oh this won't fly in the U.S. but just use Canada. They're simple and slow and will tolerate it."

I guess put simply, the little brother is worried he'll get exploited. It's partly why the fight for NAFTA and tariffs got so bitter.

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#14

Post by sonnyblarney »

mabbo wrote: post #9

> Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had acquired disused land in Toronto, Canada for this bold urban experiment "Disused land" is a bit disingenuous. Toronto real estate prices are very high right now and this is waterfront property. It's former industrial land we're hoping to revitalize. As far as I can tell, Google isn't doing us a favor here. They're just another developer trying to make a bunch of money…

" Google isn't doing us a favor here. They're just another developer trying to make a bunch of money off of our huge need for additional housing."

Though I don't like the prospects of Google doing this, there are two issues with the comment:

- Google is probably 'doing the city a favour'. Google has a gadgillion dollars we've handed to them, and their de-facto cost of capital (internally at least) is very cheap. The project probably won't make them a dime, it's borderline one of those 'moonshot' things, a speculative project that they can maybe learn from, get some PR, a giant branding exercise. They could easily lose a lot of money. They are definitely not doing this is a regular 'real estate play'.

- Toronto 'desperately needs housing'? Then why is Toronto very aggressively bringing in 100K people per year into the city? That seems like a dumb thing to do with a 'lack of housing'? Housing prices are a function of market demand, interest rates, and distorted somewhat by small amounts of inelastic demand from elsewhere.

But your original comment i.e. disusland is apt: the land is very valuable. The city should ideally zone it for whatever purpose we think is best, and then sell it. Then it will very actively 'used' for the purposes in which we have zoned it, and we don't need to worry at all about managing it.

Surely there are some strategic things we could to, but again that has a lot to do with zoning: maybe we want a big park, maybe a huge shopping mall, maybe 10000 identical homes, maybe 10000 entirely unique homes, maybe giant factories, maybe tiny factories - we can mostly zone and regulate for what we want.

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#15

Post by notatoad »

njepa wrote: post #2

It looks like every (mostly useless) waterfront, science city or business park I have ever been to. Is there something new here, or is it like with many things these days that people's perception have diverged from reality?

the most innovative thing i've seen talked about is an a hidden utility corridor running to all the buildings for trash pickup. Which can't actually be an original idea, can it?

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#16

Post by luckylion »

njepa wrote: post #7
ilaksh wrote: post #4

To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance. If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval. What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects. But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever sp…

I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges. I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful in…

> solve the inherent problems with surveillance

Which problems?

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#17

Post by notatoad »

I actually hope this project goes through, just because if it's google doing it everybody will be watching closely and there might actually be some privacy regulations that come out of it. The data they'll want to collect is valuable, and sooner or later somebody is going to try to collect it.

Kicking google out of the city doesn't change that, it just means somebody you're less likely to suspect and more likely to sell raw data to the highest bidder will come in in their place.

Re: Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto

#18

Post by luckylion »

PorterDuff wrote: post #3

I think that Google should build company housing at their main facilities, give their people somewhere to live, and watch them 24/7 like lab rats. You could accomplish an interesting experiment plus deal with the problem of giving new hires a place to live.

Movie recommendation: We Live In Public
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