In the video of “Beyond Smart City”, Professor Emerita talked about the three key economic imperatives that defines the surveillance capitalism. The very first imperative is extracting data in volume. And the second is scope. She said, “It’s not only volume. We can find rich, new varieties of data from what people say, when they are talking and walking through the city, where they are going, what they are doing, whom they are doing it with. Our faces our bodies, our blood streams, our brains, all of these are new varieties of data and constitute new supply chains that are flowing into these factories.” The third is intervening system. She said, “The very best predictive data comes from actually intervening in the state of play.” In other words, people sometimes proactively engage with certain technology, however, this technology is in return influencing them at the same time since the data is immediately collected, analyzed and given feedback. People tend to think that humans are subject, but in fact, human beings become the object under digital data analysis. Here, she quote from a data scientist that “we can engineer the context around a particular behavior and force change. That way, we are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” This got me thinking.
We learn our own behavior systems and teach these skill to machines, making machines to imitate us, and finally, it is these machines (technologies) that are affecting our behavior in return. It sounds like a “Möbius strip”, which implicates the relation between human and technologies.
The city is like a conglomeration of technologies. People built huge cities piece by piece, and eventually it turns into a giant that beyond human control. A joke says that people think it’s a person walking a dog, while it’s actually a dog walking a person. It is very interesting that some people make analogy between technology and dogs here. The city is like a more intellectual species. I would rather compare it to the human child. Parents raise their children, but the children are not usually growing up the way parents expect. Children use dialogues, texts and acts to keep communicating with their parents, as the cities using neighborhoods, streets and space constructions to interact with their citizens. Children know their parents through long-time period together, observing and imitating, as the more and more smart cities know citizens through facial recognition, human-habits learning and adaption and all kinds of data collection.
I still remember an episode of black mirror called “social media”, in which people can see each other with a floating window above heads, showing each social likability and other parameters. It is exaggerate and imagined but has implications. In this digital era, we get to know someone by certain parameter——how many followers he/she has on social media, how high his/her Alipay rating and credit, how often he/she orders on Eleme/Meituan, etc. It seems that technologies, cities and all kinds of inanimate systems are learning us in this way as well. Human and inanimate systems get to know intellectual creatures in almost the same way. Human becomes mechanized, while machine becomes in intelligent.
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