While smart tech can be a huge enabler, as this conference notes, past history should provide cautions about how any technological advance can be misused or poorly applied to extract wealth rather than advance human health and progress.
The fast-growing world of smart city tech is redolent with such upbeat narratives — stories, or “use cases,” in industry parlance, about technologies that claim to improve or at least help navigate the complexities of urban life. Smart city technologies, proponents say, have the capacity to make urban spaces cleaner, more accessible and even more democratic. […]
