Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto • Hacker News Board

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#171

Post by asdff » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #156

asdff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when city council members profit off of the status quo? It's not that they are poorly informed, they are well aware of what they are doing and choose to ignore expert advice on city planning decisions. This is the frustration I have with my local government in LA. Most people who live in my city are renters, but most voters in local elections are homeowners so their voice is heard above all else, and c…

> Most people who live in my city are renters, but most voters in local elections are homeowners Sounds like renters should start voting. Why would city council members do anything for the interests of people that don't vote? Not only is it against their own self-interest, it's anti-democratic. Elected representatives have to do what their voters want - it's the bedrock of democracy. That reps are profiting off the s…

I rent, I vote. Plenty of people do vote. But, a typical homeowner in LA is more well off and therefore has more free time to wait in line to vote, so that is who is most likely to vote. There are people here who need to work 60-80 hour weeks to survive.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#172

Post by thewebcount » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #124

reaperducer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is for people to understand how to choose better for themselves. Not a technology patch. Google only has one hammer: the algorithm. It just comes in different colors. Traffic? Waymo algorithm. Municipal planning? Smart Cities algorithm. Advertising? AdSense algorithm. Journalism? Google News algorithm. Google, and certain other tech companies, need to learn that not every problem can be solved by a compu…

Curious: what problem could be solved by a human (or group of humans) but not a computer (or group of computers)?

Any problem where the inputs are ambiguous. Like when YouTube's ContentID takes down your video of you playing your original composition because someone else decided to claim it. Like when your Gmail account is closed because of a "Terms of Service" violation, but they won't tell you which one or show you what you did wrong. Basically most problems people have with Google could be solved by having a human spend 5 seconds looking into the issue and realizing, "Oh yeah, this is an edge case with an answer that's pretty obvious to a human, but not an algorithm."

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#173

Post by 52-6F-62 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #138

52-6F-62 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will indeed. I'm hopeful, though. For all that can be said about Tory he has proven to react in the peoples' favour when he actual has to face the consequences of not acting. I'm referring to the case of our subways A/C breaking in the middle of summer heat waves. When he actually rode it end-to-end with someone who raised the issue with him and he stepped off at the end of the line drenched in sweat he actually a…

That's a very low bar though, isn't it? I'd be happy with that kind of responsiveness from a mayor of a mid-sized Russian city appointed by Putin. Like ooh, we got lucky this time, the tsar sent us someone not entirely incompetent. I expect more from my Canadian elected officials. It's all about who the voters elect though, and what kind of feedback they give politicians, that's definitely true.

It's no hard defense of John Tory. It's just an observed behaviour that I hope works in our favour (as it did with the subway line).

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#174

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

geddy wrote: post #122

refurb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).

Housing projects, so that in a year everyone can complain about the crime rate increasing and the quality stores closing and being replaced by fast food chains. It's like everyone's solution to make everything affordable is to aim to please everyone below the poverty line while giving a middle finger to everyone above it.

Wait what, you're saying that poor people bring crime right? And what's your solution, to make them even poorer or homeless? Or are you just using class as a proxy for something else?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#175

Post by jocker12 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #118

I know there's gonna be a lot of people here that are happy about this for various reasons (anti-Google, anti-"smart cities", etc), but this is really disappointing for me. It's true that the concept of "cities" (or even just "gatherings of people") predates the Internet by thousands of years, and that cities themselves haven't adapted much to the Internet and what it enables in the 40ish years it's been around. This…

You should read this - https://smartenoughcity.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/8dthlkrx/releas...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#176

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

drusepth wrote: post #124

reaperducer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is for people to understand how to choose better for themselves. Not a technology patch. Google only has one hammer: the algorithm. It just comes in different colors. Traffic? Waymo algorithm. Municipal planning? Smart Cities algorithm. Advertising? AdSense algorithm. Journalism? Google News algorithm. Google, and certain other tech companies, need to learn that not every problem can be solved by a compu…

Curious: what problem could be solved by a human (or group of humans) but not a computer (or group of computers)?

Anything that involves interpretation of ambiguous scenarios (most famous: Twitter, YT and Facebook deleting legal content that falls under freedom of speech based upon abusive mass reports but refusing to account for patterns of trolling behavior), and much that requires creative input (i.e. photo/video composition, shooting and editing).

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#177

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #155

vkou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder who you think would move into that? Typically, migrant tech workers who came from somewhere else. In the rest of the world that is not San Francisco, there is, in fact, an unprecedented rate of construction of new properties. Seattle has more active cranes building than anywhere else in North America. The Vancouver skyline changes year-over-year as 30-story condos spring up like mushrooms around SkyTrain s…

All that means is demand is increasing faster than supply.

Or, just maybe, the situation is a bit more complex than that, and demand as well as supply are stratified as well as other ancillary effects affecting prices beyond that?

Or are we just going to pretend that the world works just like an economics 101 textbook and close our eyes to the real problems instead?

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#178

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

rahulnair23 wrote: post #144

drusepth wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: what problem could be solved by a human (or group of humans) but not a computer (or group of computers)?

Inequity, education, sustainability, public policy, governance - few examples where techno-solutionism isn't the right approach.

Actually it would be, at least for sustainability, inequality and parts of public policy/governance. Simulations of "what-if-when" scenarios or analysis of data (which is what public policy of any kind should be based upon anyway) are precisely what computers excel at.

What humans (or rather: our governments) don't excel at: accurately using the data that technology gives us. We know that climate change is real, man-made and will fuck up entire continents, but still there are world leaders actively rejecting science.

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#179

Post by pdkl95 » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #160

na85 wrote: post #140

My issue with Sidewalk Labs was the incredibly obvious facade they put up: pretending to care about making cities better when it really was just a thin veneer over finding new ways to expand surveillance capitalism. In fact their "Head of Urban Systems" was quoted[0] as saying that public discussions over data ownership and privacy were "irresponsible". The true agenda is plainly obvious to anyone who cares to look.…

"surveillance capitalism". Sounds like the latest meaningless activism buzzword that tries to engender anti-surveillance support from anti-capitalists. What's next, Communist Vegans?

If you really haven't heard the term "surveillance capitalism" before, this[1] interview is a very good overview of the topic, including this explanation of the term:

>> So even early on in the theorizing of capitalism it was understood that capitalism takes on different market forms and different eras in the context of different technologies. We’ve had mercantile capitalism, and we’ve had factory capitalism, and mass-production capitalism, and managerial capitalism, financial capitalism. And typically what happens in these new concepts is that modifier, like “mass production,” or in my case “surveillance” capitalism, what that modifier is doing is pinpointing the pivot of value creation in this new market form.

> engender anti-surveillance support from anti-capitalists

Every anti-capitalist I know has already been anti-surveillance for a long time.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-an...

Re: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

#180

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #165

sudosysgen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and in most cities incredible amounts of condos have been built and prices of rent for low-income individuals have increased massively. It does not work in the real world. Supply is not supply. For one, these condos being built can essentially not be rented, and that means that they are not supply for low and middle income individuals.

> For one, these condos being built can essentially not be rented, Non-occupancy tax. Vancouver has one.[1] 1. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

A non-occupancy tax is orthogonal to this particular issue, a lot of high rise condos cannot be rented, reasonably. And so they are only accessible to people that can afford to buy them, occupied or not.