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Urban Artificial Intelligence: From Automation to Autonomy in the Smart City.
What Role Will Robots Play in Smart Cities ?
Our cities are becoming too big for humans to be managed by only "politicians".
An AI 24/7 Governance is required to bridge this human gap.
Robocitizen and Citizen
National Governments are in competition to position themselves on the global politico-economic landscape through robotics, and they are also striving to position themselves as worldwide leaders.
With smart city projects on the drawing board worldwide, cities are becoming more integrated with information and communication technologies; this would enable them to increase operational efficiency, share information with the public and improve both the quality of government services and citizen welfare.
The advent of autonomous unmanned vehicles have led to opportunities for highly skilled workers such as robotics technicians and automation technicians to operate and maintain these vehicles.
Ubiquitous sensors in mobile robots, aerial drones, and autonomous vehicles, plus connections to municipal infrastructure through the Internet of Things, promise more efficient delivery of utilities and reduced traffic, among other things.
While the variety of sensors and applications for smart cities has grown rapidly in recent years, a lot of work remains, especially in the areas of machine learning to analyze and interpret the data from these sensors.
The world is entering an age in which autonomous robotics are emerging quickly in a pervasive way.
The skies will get smarter before the ground.
Key sensor innovation will happen in the sky before it happens on the ground.
Drones are years away, while cars and robotics will take at least a decade before they prove safe at scale.
For this reason, meaningful innovation will take place [in the air] first.
Drone hardware will enable heavier payloads and longer flight times.
Sensors will get smaller, better and cheaper.
Governments and industries will lift regulations and restrictions.
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In a future of mind uploading, will you still be you ?
Imagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In effect, a new and equally valid version of that person would now exist, in a potentially immortal, digital form.
Mind uploading is a popular term for a process by which the mind, a collection of memories, personality, and attributes of a specific individual, is transferred from its original biological brain to an artificial computational substrate. Alternative terms for mind uploading have appeared in fiction and non-fiction, such as mind transfer, mind downloading, off-loading, side-loading, and several others. They all refer to the same general concept of “transferring” the mind to a different substrate.
Once it is possible to move a mind from one substrate to another, it is then called a substrate-independent mind (SIM). The concept of SIM is inspired by the idea of designing software that can run on multiple computers with different hardware without needing to be rewritten. For example, Java’s design principle “write once, run everywhere” makes it a platform independent system. In this context, substrate is a term referring to a generalized concept of any computational platform that is capable of universal computation.
We take the materialist position that the human mind is solely generated by the brain and is a function of neural states. Additionally, we assume that the neural states are computational processes and devices capable of universal computing are sufficient to generate the same kind of computational processes found in a brain.
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