A more apt comparison might involve another appliance like a toilet or maybe a douche female hygiene accessory but this bit of commonplace tech hype touts recent high-priced surveillance sensors along the toy train streetcar line. Checkit:
Sensor-studded Kansas City is like a giant smartphone. Now it just needs apps
Your city is dumb. The potholed streets, coin-operated parking meters, and drafty brick buildings many of us interact with every day haven't changed much in a century. But it's finally happening. From Oslo to San Diego, cities across the globe are installing technology to gather data in the hopes of saving money, becoming cleaner, reducing traffic, and improving urban life.
In KCMO this kind of technology would be nothing more than a faster and more effective way to gather information about needed municipal services which would then be ignored by city hall, just like the same information is paid no attention to now.
ReplyDeleteActually governing a city in behalf of the people who live and have businesses there is really hard if you spend all your time at the Chamber of Commerce and listening to the latest pitch from some "developer" or out-of-town salesman convincing you that if you don't buy what he's selling "you'll be left behind".
Then you can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a consultant to come in and tell you what's going on in your own operation, just like happened with the KCPD.
Sitting on lots of money and without a clue.