Top

Ethics and Information Technology

Published in:

16-12-2019 | Original Paper

The ethics of Smart City (EoSC): moral implications of hyperconnectivity, algorithmization and the datafication of urban digital society

Author: Patrici Calvo

Published in: Ethics and Information Technology | Issue 2/2020

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

Cities, such as industry or the universities, are immersed in a process of digital transformation generated by the possibility and technological convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and its consequences: hyperconnectivity, datafication and algorithmization. A process of transformation towards what has come to be called as Smart Cities. The aim of this paper is to show the impacts and consequences of digital connectivity, algorithmization and the datafication of urban digital society to outline possible ways of resolving the underlying moral conflicts.

previous article Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

next article Could robots strengthen the sense of autonomy of older people residing in assisted living facilities?—A future-oriented study

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

For further information on the application of KET in smart cities, see Obaidat and Nicopolitidis (2015).

By digitally hyperconnected citizens, we understand all the elements of society which, through devices, software or sensors, are included in nested networks of constant, mass data exchange.

Translated by Simon Berrill.

This surveillance programme is intended to install 600 million cameras and sensors in streets, buildings and means of public transport connected to a face recognition program based on AI and Big Data analysis to detect uncivilised, improper or criminal behaviour among citizens and to supply information in real time to the so-called Good Citizen Card, which gives or blocks access to civil service jobs or State aid, among other things. As Qiang argues 2019, p. 56), “In 2017, it was reported on CCTV that the “Skynet” project had been completed, bringing into being the largest video-surveillance network in the world. By that year, China’s network included 176 million surveillance cameras, and there were plans to increase this number to a staggering 626 million by the decade’s close. The network’s many AI-equipped cameras monitor the gender, clothing, and height of passersby, transforming the information captured on screen into data”.

At the moment, the existence of this demand is known in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, in eastern China (Yijiang 2019).

As The Guardian has pointed out, the gig economy has doubled in Great Britain during the last year (Partington 2019).

The supporters of the use of this type of predictive surveillance tool based on automatic learning argue that there are correlations between the structure of the urban environment and the distribution of crime, while the critics claim that the data on which this is based is hardly ever objective (Barbieri 2019).

For a study of the emergence and development of the ecosystem concept, see Armenteras et al. (2016), and for a study of cyberethics as applied ethics, see Sobrino (2004).

Anders, G. (1980). Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution. Munich: C.H. Beck.CrossRef

Apel, K. O. (1985). La transformación de la filosofía. Tomo II. El A Priori de la Comunidad de Comunicación. Madrid: Taurus.

Armenteras, D., González, T. M., Vergara, L. K., Luque, F. J., Rodríguez, N., & Bonilla, M. A. (2016). Revisión del concepto de ecosistema como “unidad de la naturaleza” 80 años después de su formulación. Ecosistemas,25(1), 83–89.CrossRef

Arnett, G. (19 October 2015). Map shows parts of UK most excluded from digital world. The Guardian. Retrieved July 15, 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/oct/19/map-shows-parts-of-uk-most-excluded-from-digital-world.

Barbieri, A. (2019, 18 March). ¿Puede predecirse un crimen antes de suceder con un algoritmo?. La Vanguardia. Retrieved July 15, 2019, from https://www.lavanguardia.com/tecnologia/20190318/461013536935/inteligencia-artifical-vigilancia-predictiva-policia.html.

Barlow, M., & Levy-Bencheton, C. (2018). Mart cities, smart future: Showcasing tomorrow. Oxford: Wiley.CrossRef

Bria, F., & Morozov, E. (2018). Ripensare la smart city. Torino: Codice.

Burridge, N. (2017). Artificial intelligence gets a seat in the boardroom. Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved July 15, 2019, from https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Artificial-intelligence-gets-a-seat-in-the-boardroom.

Calvo, P. (2018). Ética de las cosas (EoT). Hacia una digitalización socialmente responsable y moralmente válida del ámbito universitario. In A. Andrés & R. Sanahuja (Eds.), Un diseño universitario para la responsabilidad social. Castellón: Universitat Jaume I.

Calvo, P. (2019a). Una propuesta de línea ética basada en tecnología Blockchain. In A. Andrés & R. Sanhauja (Eds.), Transparencia e integridad en la institución universitaria. Castellón: Universitat Jaume I.

Calvo, P. (2019b). Democracia algorítmica: consideraciones éticas sobre la dataficación de la esfera pública. Revista de CLAD. Reforma y Democracia,74, 5–30.

Calvo, P. (2019c). Bioética de las cosas: sobre la algoritmización de la deliberación moral en la práctica clínica. Filosofía Unisinos,2(20), 155–162.

Center for the Governance of Change (2019). European Tech Insights 2019. Mapping European attitudes to technological change and its governance. Retrieved June 5, 2019, from http://docs.ie.edu/cgc/European-Tech-Insights-2019.pdf.

Conill, J. (2006). Ética Hermenéutica. Crítica desde la Facticidad. Madrid: Tecnos.

Cortina, A. (1986). Ética mínima. Madrid: Tecnos.

Cortina, A. (1990). Ética sin moral. Madrid: Tecnos.

Cortina, A. (2010). Justicia cordial. Madrid: Trotta.

Cortina, A. (2013). ¿Para qué sirve realmente… la ética?. Barcelona: Paidós.

Cortina, A., García-Marzá, D., & Conill, J. (2003). Public reason and applied ethics. The ways of practical reason in a pluralist society. New York: Routledge.

Cortina, A., & Martínez, E. (1996). Ética. Madrid: Akal.

Cukier, K.-N., & Mayer-Schöenberger, V. (2013). Big data. A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. New York: Haughton Miffin Harcourt.

Dastin, J. (2018, October 10). Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. Reuters. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G.

Davey, M. (2016, May 23). Chicago police try to predict who will shoot or be shot. The New York Times.

Donati, P. (2019). Sociología relacional de lo humano. Barañain: EUNSA.

Enderle, G. (1996). Towards business ethics as an academic discipline. Business Ethics Quarterly,6(1), 43–65.CrossRef

Etzioni, A., & Etzioni, O. (2016). AI assisted ethics. Ethics and Information Technology,18(2), 149–156.CrossRef

European Commission. (2012). Smart cities and Communities – European Innovation Partnership (2012) 4701final. Brussels: European Commission. Retrieved June 12, 2019, from http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/files/ec_communication_scc.pdf.

European Economic and Social Committee. (2015). Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on ‘Smart Cities as drivers for development of a new European industrial policy’ (2015/C 383/05). Official Journal of the European Union. Retrieved Jan 22, 2019, from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52015IE0586&from=EN.

European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities. (2018). european innovation partnership on smart cities and communities (EIP-SCC). Sofia (Bulgaria). Retrieved April 29, 2019, from https://e3p.jrc.ec.europa.eu/articles/european-innovation-partnership-smart-cities-and-communities.

European Parliament. (2014). Mapping smart cities in the EU. Policy department A: Economic and scientific policy. Retrieved January 22, 2019, from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2014/507480/IPOL-ITRE_ET(2014)507480_EN.pdf.

Fang, F. (2019, April 18). Autoridades chinas exigen instalación de cámaras de vigilancia dentro de las viviendas en alquiler. La Gran Época. Retrieved July 31, 2019, from https://es.theepochtimes.com/autoridades-chinas-exigen-instalacion-de-camaras-de-vigilancia-dentro-de-las-viviendas-en-alquiler_461362.html.

Feenstra, R., & González-Esteban, E. (2019). Autocontrol: A critical study of achievements and challenges in the pursuit of ethical advertising through an advertising self-regulation system. Journal of Business Ethics,154(2), 341–354.CrossRef

Fernández-Güell, J.-M. (2015). Ciudades inteligentes: la mitificación de las nuevas tecnologías como respuesta a los retos de las ciudades contemporáneas. Economía Industrial,395, 17–28.

García Marzá, D. (1992). Ética de la justicia: J. Habermas y la ética discursiva. Madrid: Tecnos.

García-Marzá, D., & González-Esteban, E. (2016). Ética. Castellón: Universitat Jaume I.

González, J., Cuevas, Á. & Cuevas, R. (2018). Facebook use of sensitive data for advertising in Europe. Computer Science. arXiv:1802.05030v1

Habermas, J. (1987). Teoría de la acción comunicativa I: Racionalidad de la acción y Racionalidad social. Madrid: Taurus.

Habermas, J. (2000). Aclaraciones a la ética del discurso. Madrid: Trotta.

Helfert, M., Krempels, K.-H., Klein, C., Donellan, B., & Guiskhin, O. (2011). Smart cities, green technologies, and intelligent transport systems. Cham: Springer.

Helmore, E. (2019, June 17). Profit over safety? Boeing under fire over 737 Max crashes as families demand answers. The Guardian. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/17/boeing-737-max-ethiopian-airlines-crash.

Hern, A. (2019, de julio de 26). Apple contractors ‘regularly hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings. The Guardian. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings.

Hidalgo, César A. (2015). Why information grows: The evolution of order from atoms to economies. New York: Basic Books.

Kitchin, R. (2016). The ethics of smart cities and urban science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences,374(2083), 1–15.CrossRef

Komninos, N. (2015). The age of intelligent cities: Smart environments and innovation-for-all strategies. London: Routledge.

Kumar-Kar, A., Gupta, M. P., Vigneswara-Ilavarasan, P., & Dwived, Y. K. (Eds.). (2017). Advances in smart cities: Smarter people, governance, and solutions. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Liu, D., Huang, R., & Wosinski, M. (2017). Smart learning in smart cities. Cham: Springer.CrossRef

Matsumoto, T. (2018). The day AI becomes god. The singularity will save humanity. Cambridge (NZ): Media Tectonics.

Molinero-Trías, R. (2014, January 29). Tras el concepto de smart city se encuentra una ideología muy concreta: la del consumismo. eldiario.es. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/concepto-encuentra-ideologia-concreta-consumismo_0_223277728.html.

Monasterio, A. (2017). Ética algorítmica: Implicaciones éticas de una sociedad cada vez más gobernada por algoritmos. Dilemata,24, 185–217.

Morozov, E. (2015). To save everything, click here. The folly of technological solutionism. New York: Public Affairs.

O’Brolcháin, F., & Gordijn, B. (2019). Privacy challenges in smart homes for people with dementia and people with intellectual disabilities. Ethics and Information Technology,21(3), 253–265.CrossRef

O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New York: Crown Publisher.MATH

Obaidat, M. S., & Nicopolitidis, P. (Eds.). (2015). Smart cities and homes: Key enabling technologies. New York: Morgan Kaugman.

Olarte, S. (2017). Brecha digital, pobreza y exclusión. Temas laborales,138, 285–313.

Papa, R., & Fistola, R. (2016). Smart energy in the Smart City: Urban planning for a sustainable future. Cham: Springer.CrossRef

Pardo, P. (2014, June 9). Un algoritmo, sentado en el consejo de un fondo chino. El Mundo. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2014/06/09/5394e0d722601df76f8b458f.html.

Partington, R. (2019, June 28). Gig economy in Britain doubles, accounting for 4.7 million workers. The Guardian. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/28/gig-economy-in-britain-doubles-accounting-for-47-million-workers.

Qiang, X. (2019). The road to digital unfreedom: President Xi’s surveillance state. Journal of Democracy,30(1), 53–67.CrossRef

Ragnedda, M. (2017). The third digital divide: A Weberian approach to digital inequalities. New York: Routledge.CrossRef

Ragnedda, M., & Muschert, G. W. (2013). The digital divide: The internet and social inequality in international. New York: Routledge.CrossRef

Reynolds, M. (2017, October de 4). Biased policing is made worse by errors in pre-crime algorithms. New Scientist. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631464-300-biased-policing-is-made-worse-by-errors-in-pre-crime-algorithms/.

Rodríguez-Bolívar, M. P. (Ed.). (2018). Smart technologies for smart governments. Transparency, efficiency and organizational issues. Cham: Springer.

Royakkers, L., Timmer, J., Koo, L., & van Est, R. (2018). Societal and ethical issues of digitization. Ethics and Information Technology,20(2), 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9452-x.CrossRef

Sáez, C. (2018). Augmanted democracy. CCCBLAB, Cultural Research and Innovation. Retrieved 2019, June 20, from http://lab.cccb.org/en/democracia-augmentada/. Accessed

Sánchez, R. (2019, June 5). La digitalización de Volkswagen se llevará 4.000 empleos. ABC. Retrieved July 20, 2019, from https://www.abc.es/economia/abci-digitalizacion-volkswagen-llevara-4000-empleos-201906051646_noticia.html.

Smith, M. (2016, June 22). In wisconsin, a backlash against using data to foretell. The New York Times.

Sobrino, A. (2004). Ciberética y sociedad de la información. Thémata. Revista de Filosofía,33, 59–71.

Sumpter, D. (2018). Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to fake news and filter-bubbles—The algorithms that control our lives. New York: Bloomsbury.MATH

Ulloa, J. (2018, January 18). California wanted to bridge the digital divide but left rural areas behind. Now that’s about to change. The Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-digital-divide-rural-communities-20180118-htmlstory.html. Accessed 31 June 2019

United Nation Development Programme. (2015). Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable cities and communities. Retrieved January 28, 2019, from http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html.

United Nations. (2015). World urbanization prospects: The 2014 revision. New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. Retrieved from http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Report.pdf. Accessed 14 January 2019.

van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance & Society,12(2), 197–208.CrossRef

van Dijck, J. (2016). La cultura de la conectividad. Una historia crítica de las redes sociales. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores.

Villarejo, H. (2015). Smart cities: una apuesta de la Unión Europea para mejorar los servicios urbanos. Revista de Estudios Europeos,66, 25–51.

Vinod Kumar, T. M. (Ed.). (2014). E-governance for smart cities. Cham: Springer.

Vinod Kumar, T. M. (Ed.). (2016). Smart economy in smart cities. Cham: Springer.

Walker, J. (2012, September 21). A la hora de contratar, las empresas sustituyen intuición por algoritmos. The Wall Street Journal.

Yijiang, L. (2019). CCP demands cameras installed in rental properties. Bitter winter. A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights in China. Retrieved September 31, 2019, from https://bitterwinter.org/ccp-demands-cameras-installed-in-rental-properties/.

Title: The ethics of Smart City (EoSC): moral implications of hyperconnectivity, algorithmization and the datafication of urban digital society
Author: Patrici Calvo
Publication date: 16-12-2019
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Ethics and Information Technology / Issue 2/2020
Print ISSN: 1388-1957
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8439
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-019-09523-0

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Other articles of this Issue 2/2020

Edward Snowden: Permanent record

Introducing the pervert’s dilemma: a contribution to the critique of Deepfake Pornography

Robot Betrayal: a guide to the ethics of robotic deception

Cybervetting job applicants on social media: the new normal?

Meaningful human control as reason-responsiveness: the case of dual-mode vehicles

Could robots strengthen the sense of autonomy of older people residing in assisted living facilities?—A future-oriented study

Premium Partner