Welcome back for another episode of Nick’s Non-fiction with your host Nick Muniz!

In 1850 amidst old foggy London town the Crystal Palace was built setting the precedent for convention centers equipped with rudimentary hvac and human processing. The age of indoors has fully taken over, Anthony Townsend elaborates on in Smart Cities how technology brings people into urban areas the same way air conditioning once popularized the suburbs. Technology moves fast as we see the 72º Songdo convention center pioneering dynamic ticketing based on social credit score and smart re-booking. Throughout the book Townsend focus’s on reshaping culture through civic programs and further developing autonomous energy grids. An anecdote about a 1999 hacker successfully compromising part of the Manhattan power grid admits that technology inevitably has hiccups.

Hiccups always happen at the worst time like on your way into an interview. What happens when the impending fleet of driverless cars experiences a bug or a blackout causes thousands of amazon quad-copters to simultaneously fall from the sky? Townsend, a leader of Silicon Valley think tanks, forewarns if we are to create utopian garden cities we have to give up our cars. In order to win the Cold Race against Chinese AI we need a “culture of compliance” so the internet of things can harness our data… Feeling a bit queasy? No matter citizen, Chinese Cisco Vision is on its way to the states, a two way tele-screen in your dwelling linking you via live feed to the government for regular biometric readings. The unavoidable end is a dramatic Tale of Two Cities, as municipal tinkering showed in Rio de Janeiro, one city will prioritize humanity to technology while the other embraces the idea of their think tank legislators. As the World Economic Forum says, “By 2030 You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy.” Smart Cities here we come!

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0:01:00 Introduction

0:03:50 About the Author

0:07:10 Ch1: The $100 Billion Jackpot

0:16:25 Ch2: Cybernetic Redux

0:22:50 Ch3: Cities of Tomorrow

0:27:55 Ch4: Open Source Metropolis

0:35:55 Ch5: Tinkering Towards Utopia

0:39:55 Ch6: Have Nots

0:44:30 Ch7: Reinventing City Hall

0:49:00 Ch8: Planet of Civic Laboratories

0:52:15 Ch9: Buggy, Brittle & Bugged

0:56:50 Ch10: New Civics for a Smart Century

1:00:50 Next Time & Goodbye!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_doDMrMnDc

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nicks-non-fiction/id1450771426