NXP Semiconductors NV : "Smart Cities: Romance vs. Algorithms"

It used to be measurably easy. Technology firms of the last century could be happy, relaxed, and highly profitable just by making components for other machines. Those machines would take their place in the world, for sure, but that place was simply to get a single thing done. A microcontroller in a factory, say, would control a thing that made another thing, and could be siliconly satisfied in keeping the assembly line moving.

Today, though, it's not so simple. Today's semiconductors don't live simple solitary lives inside their simple appliance home, banging out widgets, or controlling traffic lights, or keeping a car's engine nicely tuned. Instead, they live in networks, interacting with each other, with the physical world, and with human society.

It's these final two things that are the challenge today. As we head towards a Smarter World, technologists are learning to use the internet to link together the electronic and mechanical systems that previously stood nobly alone. The potential advantages are huge, and well known, and provoke enormous amounts of hype, punditry, and design fiction. None more so than the concepts of the Smart City, and its parallels in architecture, organizational design, and business.

In a nutshell, because we can link our systems together with sensors, and expose the resulting data to the end user, the business owner, or the citizen, we can find possibilities for emergent real-time optimization. In other worlds: stick sensors all over a city to measure pavement pedestrian density, make that data available to app makers, who then allow citizens to see the busy-ness of their local area in real time, and we all trust them to make walking choices that optimize their experience and that of the city.

It's a compelling future, and one that already works very well, at least in the case of public transport in the world's major cities. In London, for example, I can use apps that talk, via the internet, to systems on all of the local infrastructure, to plan my travel to fit the exact system conditions of that moment. I'm optimized, and because of that am helping to make the city, if not the world, that much smarter.

But here is the deeper challenge: a truly Smarter World doesn't simply try to optimize itself against one criteria. A citizen of a smart city cannot be expected to live their lives trying to make one particular metric go in the recommended direction. City dwelling humans are not containers in a supply chain: they have individual needs, and individual criteria to optimize their lives by. Using this technology to implement a system that optimizes a city's infrastructure for, for example, speed of commute, means that we are choosing to not optimize a city for, for example, beauty, or romance, or inspiration, or serendipity.

In a Smarter World, we risk handing over those wonderful things to an algorithm that slowly adjusts the course of history towards an outcome unwanted by the majority of citizens.So technology firms today must recognize that their components are not just pieces of standalone machines, but instead are fundamental parts of complex systems that create deep changes in culture and human society. Truly visionary companies should recognize this fact, and use their roles as thought-leaders and design inspiration, to ensure such changes are what we all, rather than just some algo, actually want.