The concept of the “Internet of things” refers to the spread of Internet connectivity to everyday devices: phones, tablets, alarm clocks, cars, thermostats. And in the Internet of things, you — a human being — are a thing. You’re surrounded by sensors that try to infer facts about you, and you’re surrounded by actuators that make things happen to chivvy you along or stop you from proceeding. The intelligence, judgment, self-knowledge and sentiment that are unique to human experience — and impossible to simulate in the statistical inference systems we call “artificial intelligence” — are jettisoned by the system as unquantifiable irrelevancies. The system doesn’t ask you how you feel or what you want: it tries to guess based on what you’re doing.
A smart city of the sort that Sidewalk Labs proposes turns this surveillance-and-inference system into a pervasive straitjacket that wraps around everyone who sets foot on the public street. Indeed, the smart city might even be making observations about you while you’re in your home, from the sensors in your mattress to the sensors in your toilet.
