Nvidia has a vision for the city of the future, and it takes the always-on surveillance we’re becoming accustomed to and pushes it to whole new levels. The company’s Metropolis intelligent video analytics platform applies deep learning to constantly process and contextualize the masses of data streaming from the ever-increasing number of cameras watching us every day.
It’s one thing to have cameras watching at all times, but another altogether to do something useful with the giant stack of data they’re producing day and night. Manpower costs make sitting and watching it all unfeasible, but computers taking advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence could. And this perfectly lines up with the new direction Nvidia has been pushing in for the last few years.
(via Nvidia’s slightly terrifying Metropolis platform paves the way for smarter cities)
“Smarter” Cities
9th May 2017
Notes: 4
In the coming year, two pressures acting on cities will come to a head, forcing us to rethink the way we inhabit them.
The first pressure is the need to encourage and provide for a constant flow of international workers and companies through global cities, allowing for openness to the world as well as the influx of new capital and culture that sustains urban economies. The second is the need to retain a local identity, preserving what makes a city unique and providing for the citizens who make it home and contribute in a sustainable way to its infrastructure and spirit.
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In this panoramic, at times jaw-dropping book, Stephen Graham describes how in recent years the built environment around the world, both above and below ground, has become dramatically more vertical – and more unequal. From miles-deep gold mines in South Africa to oligarchs’ basements in Belgravia, from American schemes for lethal military satellites to Bangkok’s elevated railway for the wealthy, the Skytrain, Graham lays out a landscape where architecture reflects and reinforces divisions with ever greater brazenness.
Many of his examples are as dystopian as anything in the bleak prophecies of JG Ballard. A resident of a “luxury fortified apartment complex” in Rio de Janeiro watches tracer bullets, fired by feuding drug dealers in a favela far below. “They are beautiful!” she says. “We have a free firework display almost every day!”
(via Vertical by Stephen Graham review – class war from above | Books | The Guardian)
