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Cities could soon be looking after their citizens all by themselves thanks to an operating system designed for the metropolis.

The idea is for the Urban OS to gather data from sensors buried in buildings and many other places to keep an eye on what is happening in an urban area. The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms.

The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life.

This kind of shit scares the shit out of me. Privacy issues, ethical issues, risk of hacking by outsiders.

Can't wait till those oppressive progressives get what's coming when some 4chan dumbass hacks their UrbanOS 'for the lulz' and shuts down a major metro area, even if only for a few minutes or hours.


The article gave no mention whatsoever to acknowledging potential risks and security flaws.

Or you already live in a very precarious automated system that can be shut down easily with code that targets the controllers of various heavy machinery.

See: Iran's nuclear capability.

Also: See a 2009 webcomic story line.

The major ethical question to me is not the violation of civil rights or the potential for mischief but the social repercussions of allowing machines to have more say than people over the management of our lives.

It is a dangerous thing when we are told where to go, when, how far and how fast and for how long, just because of something we see on a screen, like animals on an industrial farm.

Security concerns aren't a big deal, if there's hacking just garrison probe teams.

So do you disagree with me? Just because there already exists the potential for malicious code buttfucking our existence, does that mean we need to create more potential?

Security concerns aren't a big deal, if there's hacking just garrison probe teams.