John Lorinc & Josh O'Kane | Appel Salon | September 19, 2022
even was basically asking sidewalk like you're not supposed to be the one to put forward policy but they were trying to put ideas out there they were saying why don't we try this and then the opponents were like no we like that even less uh we want people and our governments that we've elected to come up with policy and I think that was just an interesting lesson and maybe future governments will learn from that to figure out what do we care about who makes decisions about how technology is embedded in our physical world around us oh thank you so much for being here with us and thank you for to the Toronto Public Library for hosting this important conversation it is such a thrill to be back in person in this kind of intermediate in between stage after a couple of years uh hosting online so welcome uh we're gonna jump right into it and I am going to be watching the time I don't wear a watch though so when you see me peek at my phone I'm not texting my friends or tweeting the event I'm doing a time check because I want to make sure we have a little bit of time to throw it to you members of our audience we will have time for questions I'm going to take as many as I can I might bundle some of them together but I'm priming you now because don't leave us hanging when we turn it to the crowd uh John and Josh's books speak so well to each other I could craft I think a very spicy graduate seminar built around both of them and of course sidewalk Labs is a case study is a Common Thread here the ambition promise and challenges of smart cities and the technology that underpins or seeks to underpin them forces us to reconcile with big questions new Regulatory and governance roadblocks that are surfaced when the digital world kind of pushes back into the physical one and I want to be very careful about talking about the digital world I don't want to differentiate that from The Real World because I app absolutely believe you know the digital spaces we have to acknowledge this is part of our our real world I promised them I wouldn't do any of my own speeches okay so there are a variety of important narratives that are raised in both of these new editions these Publications uh which we do encourage you to check out at the end and they just force us to reflect on the promise and risk of new technologies how private interests May subvert public processes intentionally or not the role of Civil Society in shaping procurement decisions and the mechanics of governance decisions themselves now what do I have in my other pocket not just her cell phone but I have a clicker and we want it to kick off I think this is our Icebreaker with our visuals John do you want to talk about this first slide because you gave me the Metropolis image so the the first slide on the left is what are the renderings from the sidewalk Labs project and it was done by a leading architect I don't know how well you could see it there was a series of slides they were very lovely very Fantastical and otherworldly almost not unusual for architectural renderings but distinctly so and on the on the right you see the what are the poster images for friends uh for the for Metropolis uh Fritz Lang's dystopian film from the 1920s and uh you know so um in my book I'm thinking about the relationship between utopian ideas of cities and dystopian ideas to the man with a folio tell us about this one uh so we'll get into this I think this is on I can't actually tell from here okay all right thanks um so in in 2016 uh sidewalk Labs before they ever came to Toronto basically put together this 437 page pitch book for what they wanted a city to look like and what you see on this particular slide is what has actually turned out to be a rather uh high definition version of my phone photo of this plan this 470 through 437 page plan where they were trying to uh design a whole new city that would include a climate controlled Dome on top of it um this document was hidden under what I was told at one point literal physical lock and key uh until I got my hands on in 2019. I haven't actually shared any of these images for it uh before and I thought it'd just be interesting to show they really did want to completely reinvent cities for the ground up uh but for those of you who choose to read the book we'll discover that that plan got completely exploded and then they decided to bid on Toronto instead but I just thought I would tease that out for anyone who might be interested did in what sidewalk was sort of planning to do prior to coming to Toronto in 2017. two more quick slides are other Icebreaker was telling you about how these two met for coffee just before or just as the pandemic set in so it's a sweet sweet reunion on stage what about this one March 12 2020 uh John had just won the Atkinson fellowship and said he was going to write about smart cities and I was like I had just gotten back from New York and had cracked open some of the early day stuff sidewalk and I was like you know if this project breaks ground which is an naive thing to think I could write a book about it and I was we I was sussing him out and in the end we wrote extremely complimentary books so thank you for writing your book John and thank you and it was at 401 Richmond in front of the spacing store and as I recall we sort of did elbow bumps because it was like about a week before the NBA canceled season sweet memories so are you guys in this slide uh no this slide is actually what life would look like under the dome in the utopian future uh so that's the weird grid that you grid pattern that you see there um ready for the last one all right it's like they're like fast what did you put in this presentation this is my final one so this is what their Utopian city would look like from aerial view with sort of Master Plan neighborhoods uh some of them radiating from around the central dome which some people inside sidewalk uh rather smartly pointed out that would you not create what is effectively a caste system by people who lived under the dome of people who didn't live under the dome um and uh that question was never answered because a lot of questions never got answered I know many of us saw these you know in the past so I'm glad to bring forward these images that actually concludes our presentation so thank you might take this home just kidding these are so valuable I love a clicker um I'm not going to do our elevator question which is you know give us give us your your 30 second Pitch on what a smart city is but we can roll into that but in this context that can be very polarized between techno optimism techno pessimism just give us the deal out the gate are you guys both ludites do you hate reject technology what's the story what's what what's your approach when you think about new technologies what's the framework I would not be able to live without a smartphone uh I got a smartphone the day I moved to Toronto in 2009 and would not have been able to navigate without looking like an idiot getting ready to get mugged holding up with a map every 30 seconds uh I live and die by a lot of Technologies I think a lot of us here do I'm certainly not anti-technology um I though I do drive a 2007 Honda Civic that is uh I would love to not have to plug in like three dongles in order to listen to music on my phone uh but the only reason I'm allotted in that form is because I'm cheap um but I cover technology sort of from the Globe and Mail perspective I didn't want to cover technology for a lot of part of my earlier career uh because particularly in the early 2010s a lot of Technology reporting was very fawning it was very device oriented it was oh my goodness like what is this next you know cool thing that we're going to do and that didn't interest me but starting around 2015 2016 there was a shift towards more Watchdog style journalism covering technology companies and that very much interested me because it's very much in line with the globe's vision of sort of holding larger organizations to account in the best interest of Canadians and um so when I approach my reporting on this I would approach this the same way that a parliament reporter would approach the pmo or that a banking reporter would approach um and you know what is in the best interest of the people who you should be held accountable to so by no means am I a lot I I just take a very old school reporter's approach 2 technology and you know that kind of critical lens John Now's the Time to come clean so I don't think I'm gonna let it either I I'm not an early adopter my own relationship with technology is that um I need I I want to learn it if I need to use it and I'm not sort of you know one of those guys who sort of sits around thinking oh I want to find out what this gadget does and so on I come to the subject this way I so I have a degree in math from U of T from a long time ago and so I like numbers I'm interested in technology I'm interested in the history of technology and obviously I'm interested in cities and um so you know there are there are technologies that we use in our personal lives that um you know that our consumer choices and sort of are kind of more limited in their impact but the technologies that you know that I was interested in with the with dream states it was smart City stuff and all the side the sidewalk stuff are technologies that have a broader reach and so we you know and I agree with Josh about sort of approaching it you know with the skeptical and eye and scrutinizing what we're talking about because they're technologies that um affect us Society more generally in complicated ways that are more difficult to understand than the way we might relate to um like I have an ecobee I'm smart thermostat in my house for example and it's pretty you know it does what it does I like what it does but it's not a broader societal thing I think also yeah sometimes the word smart like how smart is that ecobee it's pretty smart actually used to be a Canadian company I believe might still be vests check your facts um John maybe we can kind of go a little bit back in time your maybe we can start with more around the history of that dream that ambition of smarter cities and thank you both for entertaining my you know lowball ludai question but I think often they're we're very reductionist with the framing of how we try to talk about something new where it's yes or no now or never and it's hard to have those conversations in the spaces in between as well which isn't a question I wanted to ask you about histories but you wanted to maybe respond to something no oh I was just going to point out that I think it's I think it's a good question because there are people who uh were like either worked for or with sidewalk Labs that would routinely accuse people in the media of asking hard questions of being anti-technology um and you know it's basically trying to you know that's a tactic that's you know it's meant to dissuade people from asking hard questions and you just don't really listen to it and you keep going but you know that is something that I've been accused of and a lot of my colleagues have been accused of who covered this file so I think it's a reasonable question I was doing it in a large light-hearted way but that's good to understand too John we've got a his we have a history of trying to imagine a better City and introducing playing around with trying out newer Technologies not always digital Technologies and you take us through a wonderful history in the book I know you can't totally condense it but take us where you want to go just just watch me uh so I I one of the things I wanted to do with this book is set up the whole conversation about Smart City technology by just kind of looking a little bit at the history of Technology as it applies to cities and you know we have many technologies that have evolved over hundreds and thousands of years but there there's a subset of that those technologies that directly bear on the way cities function and indeed exist and a lot of them we take for granted answered you know I have some very basic examples lentils you know lentils make buildings stand up and prevent you from being crushed while you go through a door the s-bend on a you know on your toilet allows uh you know allows sewers to operate and uh and you know the the invention of asphalt there are a whole series of these Technologies many of them about civil engineering that that enable us to live like this um and so these are good things that I definitely would not want to argue against these this very broad family of Technologies and you know as you know in the 20th century I mean they become you know these Technologies become more and more sophisticated they become like you know electrical Technologies and digital Technologies and and there are you know all of these you know these technologies that basically went into the creation of the Smart City and the smart city in fact created this notion that certain types of digital Technologies and sensors and Internet of Things sensors could actually enable the the physical Technologies of the City bridges and Roads and traffic lights and so on to work more effectively that was the promise and you know it's a it's an interesting um uh it's an interesting sort of statement to unpack to see whether it's true or not anything you want to chase there about history of daydreaming because I got more questions for you but I want to give you a chance no I think we can we can go on because I think we have a lot of questions so it's all good okay Josh like fast I have questions for you like why don't you keep moderating okay um here's another quick one for both of you and then we'll get into some some longer ones so the the debate that we had in the city of Toronto together Canada Ontario regarding sidewalk Labs specifically what would you say that debate was really about at its core right was it about real estate was it about rights intellectual property rights data rights the value of data ownership was it a governance question and I I'm quoting something here like I'm doing a book report uh I can't remember which book it's from so that could be the question just kidding data is both the opportunity and Flash points Flashpoint in most conversations about Smart City technology that would have been a good opening game quotes and you guys have to say if it's from your book or not did we ever find the right way to talk or think about sidewalk cities a sidewalk labs and smart cities or were we talking around some of the core issues what do you think I think a lot of people were talking about the true bigger picture issues and they were instantly framed as opponents to sidewalk labs and people who were fans of sidewalk Labs or who were paid by Sidewalk Labs made it look as if they were anti-progress as a result what we witnessed here in Toronto was a debate over who gets a say in the future of cities like John's book really expands upon that in like a lot of really great and interesting ways of sort of how these inventions sort of Rose throughout history to sort of underpin a lot of the literal physical infrastructure that makes a society and what the debate over sidewalk Labs was in Toronto was you know who gets this say and it fundamentally comes down to to you know is this something that is determined by individuals or is this something that is determined by the market and we never resolved that and I don't know if we ever will resolve that question no matter how many companies go into how many other cities um because we're in a market oriented democracy um and so there's an inherent Clash there so I think that the um there were two big forces that kind of um had a massive head-on collision with sidewalk Labs the first was that the city was in this process of Reinventing itself as as Silicon Valley North in a and so there was you know there's the Toronto Waterloo Tech Corridor uh there was Donald Trump who uh LED you know who caused a lot of smart people software engineers and entrepreneurs and Venture capitalists to come up you know to Canada to flee you know all the stuff that was going on and you know the me it's you know it seems like forever ago but the you know the mid 2010s was a period when uh Tech was really in its ascendancy and it was really seen as something that was um you know that was the future of the local economy right you know the Toronto economy is built on cars banking mining Finance food processing and then there was this thing this magical thing called the tech economy and we wanted to have a piece of it so much so in fact that besides sidewalk labs and everyone forgets this that we bid to have Amazon's H2 hq2 which would have been a giant like you know it would have been this giant sort of thing that you know sucked up all the engineers working in the in the region so that was on the one side and on the other side there is this long and fraught conversation about the future of the city's Waterfront which I've been covering for a long time and um you know and there there's you know sort of a cyclical thing where you know there's speculation and building and then there's some pushback and you know we I think probably many of you remember when Doug Ford wanted to build a ferris wheel and a big mall in the Portlands and there's a lot of process around that there's a lot of political energy around that and these two things like a hot front like a warm front and a cold front just went boom and that's what the side walk Labs controversy said to me thank you you touched on people each of you a little bit in your answers and and both your both these books challenge us to think about people in smart cities uh Josh your account reminds us I think primarily about people in power how they communicate how they make decisions how they are what accountability mechanisms there are and John you make really important points about people in capacity as well right for instance touching on the labor implications of smart cities in terms of new hires and Technical expertise and Investments over time our Smart City Technologies supposed to save us money on HR or have us spend more you mentioned marketplaces what's the value proposition there in terms of expenditure and efficiency and do we see that promise playing out or do we see it something that's persuasive or are we still in a stage of wow Big Data analysis is can be really incredible let's sort of see what we can do so the original Smart City movement which to sort of take things back to what I was just saying earlier is just a branding term it means nothing no one ever really it was a play an expansion upon smartphones a few years after smartphones became big um and a few companies like Cisco Siemens and IBM we're basically selling these sort of functions to cities the way they had always sold functions to businesses um that would make things more efficient to save that money that was the mo it was fundamentally a business to business play and if I say oh business to business usually they makes half a room falls asleep which I think sidewalk realized because sidewalk actively tried to distance itself from that sort of let's make things more efficient for city government they really were and a lot of people who worked for that organization were really pushing to make uh like come up with ideas that would make cities more livable that would be more sustainable and allow technology to solve problems but they never actually finished doing what they plan to do because it was fundamentally a market play and one of the big stories I actually wrote towards the end of the uh sidewalk lab Saga for the globe in like early 2020 just before we had coffee was there was this big like another like 600 page report there are so many multi hundred or thousand page reports that I think I'm the only person in the world who's read twice that wasn't paid directly by Sidewalk to write them and uh you know one of them they basically laid out all these plans being like we're gonna have to upgrade all this software we're going to give you some really cool technology but you got a choice and we're going to let you pick that is do you want to like basically pay to have someone on hand to upgrade the software for you on the city and they're going to be on your salary or do you basically want to pay the equivalent of like a license fee which is like you know every time you know Microsoft Office says oh you got to pay us another 200 if you don't want someone to hack your computer through word for some reason um imagine that but like scale up to every telephone pole in the city that was a question they asked but made a choice not to answer um part of that is because they did walk away but now the company doesn't even exist anymore um and so yeah really was like are we trying to save money and the answer is I don't know because they said that they were different from all these other organizations but then didn't really come prepared to answer the question when asked directly anything you want to add can I ask them a question sure okay I've got a question for you because I have a theory about this so do you think that what sidewalk labs and Google wanted to do was disrupt the multi-billion dollar very Hardware based uh Smart City industry I don't think there really was that much of an industry I think there were four or five companies and then 10 or 12 engineering and consulting firms that were trying to build an industry that was not particularly coordinated or consolidated and what I learned from my reporting is that sidewalk Labs was throwing a billion ideas against the wall and just trying to figure out what sticked and what made the most money and if you read the book or some of my later coverage of the sidewalk lab stuff even though they kept saying that this was sort of a thing they're gonna they're willing to lose a lot of money at first it did come out towards the end that this was fundamentally a thing that they did have to profit from that they were under pressure from alphabet and its Chief Financial Officer in particular uh to have to profit so yeah it's interesting that sidewalk Labs uh you'll correct me if I'm wrong with this was my impression really kept a distance from this phrase smart city um they wanted they had they had a you know I think it's your as your slides at the beginning uh suggested they have something much grander in mind uh which uh you know that like that was the utopian element well sidewalk Labs that's super important to point out and thank you for quarterbacking on on questions that was a good one um sidewalk Labs may have left Toronto but that label or brand as as you say of smart City it persists right that hasn't gone away we didn't have a referendum on that in fact in many areas of the city some people are calling for more instances of automation for instances the uh speed cameras that ticket people automatically and sort of police some of our streets right um how has the smart cities agenda either moved forward or stalled since and I'm happy to put that you know in a in a pandemic context too where there have been some instances where we seem comfortable with new forms of surveillance that are aggregated and anonymized I'll I'll point to poop there but you know more than me on this I mean you study toilets extensively in your book so why don't you go first because she's talking about poop so I think that the um the label this brand or this this vessel in which we report all the ideas about smart cities um has waned so what but ironically the you know our the urban dependence on technology and on digital Technologies has like dramatically escalated for reasons that every single person in this audience knows right that we you know we spent two years online you know transitioning our businesses and our lives into this digital space that has had an impact on the way cities function the way you know we move around in cities the things we do in cities the things we don't need to do in cities anymore um and you know there there's been this emergence of new types of digital Technologies um and you know the one uh the one that thus referenced is the Wastewater surveillance which is this you know this approach which has been used taken up by uh you know Public Health officials to sample you know Wastewater sewer water to see the incidence of um you know of the viral load um and you know draw inferences about you know this state of the pandemic and there are already companies that are sort of taking this and scaling this technology and saying okay well we could use it for you know this virus or that virus or you know find evidence of you know drug use or if we put it right outside your factory we could figure out what's happening in your factory and so that's like you know that's poop surveillance right so uh uh you know when you go to the washroom sorry about this but when you go to the washroom at your workplace you know did you you know did you sign a consent form for you know whatever flows down the drain to be sort of analyzed so you know this is this is the place we've moved to um and it's all very technological I'm going to answer the question I think in a little bit of different way is it to sort of zoom out on sort of what the future of smart cities is is I think it's really forked right now um I think what we learned in Toronto and what so the other case study in my book uh sort of 10 the rest of 90 is what happened in Toronto but it did a case study in my book is um the sort of movement by a bunch of activists in Berlin uh who more directly pushed away a Google startup campus from the neighborhood of courseberg um and the what we learned from Toronto and what we learned from Berlin was I that at a minimum the least controversial way to approach these kinds of projects is probably going to be why don't you ask people what they want like that's what Barcelona does uh Barcelona is literally has an idea to solicit an app that solicits ideas for how to improve the city that all residents get um and in the other direction is even further in the direction of the sidewalk Labs went which is sort of the very so if that was the bottom up like let's see what the people want and get what they want the other is the very top-down mode That Sidewalk Labs uh tried not to be but ultimately was accused of being which was here's a bunch of great ideas um and uh as a quick aside like the 1500 page master plan that they put out in 2019 where they said that a lot of those ideas came from consultations with torontonians if you had actually read a lot of the documents that they had made public and the ones that I was leaked a lot of those ideas they actually had and they were just looking for a stamp of approval um that's just going to keep happening uh if you look at neum in Saudi Arabia it's a master plan Community that's just going to be filled with uh Smart City Technologies that's just being designed by an authoritarian government to try to Showcase Smart City Technologies to the world including this extremely long City that's sort of just called the line and then Mark Laurie the uh founder of diapers.com is taking his billions and he is trying to build uh much like Larry Page wanted to do before he started sidewalk and what sidewalk was born from which is to build like a sort of very Loosely regulated uh city that you can sort of fill with interesting ideas and potential experiments um and sort of it's the idea of how far from government restrictions can you go to do these sorts of ideas so you're going to see more top heavy approaches but you're also going to see more bottom-up approaches and I don't know if one is going to win or if we're going to see those two movements Clash again like we did in Toronto but the future is sort of this this great Divergence well the Wastewater surveillance is kind of like a bottom down approach just kidding that was a poop joke again but I actually think it's a good example to bring up in terms of a form of surveillance I'll move away from this obviously I have other questions it's just the poop joke times ten no but it is a form of surveillance aggregated anonymized information that we did not have a referendum on that we did not have a conversation on that nobody came to City Hall and pitched a few years ago you know what you could really do with your waste water let me tell you this it was born out of a kind of necessity and maybe that helps us think of some of the Smart City interventions in terms of or potential interventions right how we start to sort and sift through the nice to have and the need to have as we continue to reimagine and day dream about better cities because hey many of us are here in the city of Toronto right now not hard to imagine a better city right okay Josh a new question not not Vasa stand up anymore um some of what you Chronicle and sideways seems to suggest a kind of naivete expressed through federal government memos that we're excited about the promise of maybe the the economic development associated with the sidewalk Labs project in a way that might have failed to recognized or anticipate what is now commonly accepted as some of the potential risks or harms and I think this mirrors what you were touching on earlier in terms of maybe some of how your own journalism has evolved right we know a lot about public policy and how media has evolved over time going from being dazzled to being a little bit more more critical um in hindsight should we be embarrassed that we were a little bit wooed by this promise or what was it that made us vulnerable to the the seduction of of a concept and you know a lot of people did compete for h2q and in hindsight people view that as kind of a free data for Amazon about Economic Development and kind of place making very long question but should we be embarrassed or what can we learn from how we approach this from a policy standpoint as a reporter I'm not going to answer whether or not we should be embarrassed I will look into the audience and take a look and see um but uh I can't say I I can't say Hey you know you don't do this with a new story but when you spend four years covering a project you know I have looked at dozens of email threads and memos exchanged within the federal government and particularly during the first term of the current liberal government uh there was extreme nivete about what big Tech was doing and what its power was but I need to reflect that in society more broadly at the time there was nothing more Progressive looking than a job at Facebook or Google and if you were a politician at the time and you had a chance to get into boardrooms in Davos and Sun Valley and all those other places that they all hang out you are probably going to see if you can get those people to come and bring you jobs um if I were running a country would I be looking at foreign direct investment as a 3D Puzzle instead of a 2d puzzle I'm just going to let that question linger rather than answer it yeah I was like because it's being recorded and maybe at some point you could be running a country so you want to be careful all I'm saying is I've collected the evidence and the evidence pointed to a pattern um that there were no hard questions being asked and if there were hard questions being asked which only really substantively happened after media started asking questions um they were in the framework of okay yes but we don't want to lose these guys um and only after that only in the second term uh did the federal government start in one very quick shot start putting out a bunch of bills to actually try to Grapple with big tax power they did eventually learn that lesson um how many of those bills have passed I think the answer is none I could be wrong um I study this and the answer is none yeah I don't have to check my notes but we're getting there fall legislative session coming back do you want to chase that question yeah I think that the um I think that we were really in the thrall of this sort of innovation agenda um which was a point of differentiation for the federal liberals compared to the uh the Stephen Harper government and you know it was forward-looking it was it sort of ran against the heroes of wood and drawers of water cliches about the Canadian economy it was very Urban um you know so it ticked off a lot of boxes I completely agree that it was naive and you know one of the things that I found interesting in researching some of this is that there's like this long string of failed Smart City projects which are which were basically you know real estate plays that had this kind of you know frosting that involved you know beautiful technology that was gonna you know do all sorts of wonderful things and you know you find them in India you find them in South Korea you find them in Indonesia in Latin America and then the the biggest of them all was like hidden in plain view which is Hudson yards in New York which is where sidewalk labs's offices and which which is this you know this Mega development not a success Us in my view that had there was you know wired to the nines and and this is what the you know part of the vision was the CEO of sidewalk Labs was the deputy mayor of New York who of course uh pushed through Hudson yards to exist Dan doctor so now we're talking about people a little bit more and let's come back to my earlier people question don't worry I won't read it again I just have a related one um I sort of think that Toronto's experience with sidewalk Labs illuminated the significant interplay and competition amongst voices for seniority for influence for power we had Don dance Rolodex we had familiar academics co-signing open letters we had former mayors making statements members of Civil Society we probably haven't explored the Civil Society aspect enough in this conversation quite yet organizing a kind of resistance or peer learning or kind of helping demystify as people who are studying power and decision making at a kind of meta level what kind of sources do you think Toronto decision making or city making privileges if any and instead of being so backward looking as I've been so far how are we seeing this play out in the election campaign that we're in if at all are we even talking about ideas anymore right now I'll go first because uh John is a longtime chronicleer of the city of Toronto I only moved here in 2009 so he has a much better uh I think understanding of the city's history and how this has worked out over time um I will say that when I moved here I moved here from the maritimes and was deeply surprised uh at How Deeply insecure Toronto is and how its people in power are constantly scrambling to be adjacent to anything that resembles greatness um I say that with like like like I I say that as with a sort of reporter's distance from all this it is it was quite astonishing to come from somewhere else like the maritimes is a much more confident and it's in its place in the world uh than Toronto is uh which was quite shocking to me um and speaking only in the context of what I reporter for this book because I don't want to go outside my level of expertise which is a bumpkin from New Brunswick and a guy who spent four years studying sidewalk um a lot of the people who welcome sidewalk did not necessarily uh properly I think investigate or criticize or critically sort of study what was what was happening here and the idea this isn't everyone and I want to make sure that no one's making it seem because this is going to be recorded uh that you know I am making a statement on behalf of all power Brokers in the city but a significant number of them that did interact with this project were not necessarily asking I think the obvious questions uh and again that's hindsight it's 2020. I don't want to look like I'm trying to make someone very angry here but the question necessarily asked but I'm really interested in John's answer to this question well I mean there are lots of different nodes of power in um in Toronto but obviously the banks and the bank headquarters are one of the most important ones especially given who's in the mayor's office these days and I think that one of the things that um you know many people didn't quite realize is the extent to which the banking industry and the technology industry sort of became highly interconnected and so the bank towers are full of you know fintech companies you know Financial technology companies you know the the banks are nervous about the fintechs they buy them so they don't you know so the fintechs don't swallow them whole eventually you know a lot of the money that you know flows out of you know technology companies on King Street West into you know excellent restaurants you know these are this is where the new economic clout lives and you know there were people who are close to Tori and close to the province and close to the Prime Minister who you know who were you know very connected to that world and you know who sort of elevated it to being um you know the the next kind of big source of economic um attraction right that was the thing that was going to bring jobs and prosperity to the city um and it was forward-looking it was Modern it was all these things that you know that Toronto likes Toronto likes to be think of itself as modern we always have you know Ed you know you know post pandemic and pre-pandemic I mean the conversation the political conversation couldn't be more different uh you know you don't hear you know the city lo you know Municipal politicians sort of singing the Praises of the tech industry anymore you know there was a sort of a you know there was a reckoning about that um and you know I mean nobody's talking about anything in the municipal election excuse me uh you know it's like the it's a very dull election um but it's certainly not an election about um about technology and in fact you know the other great note of power in um you know in the Toronto area which is real estate development is sort of reasserted itself as this you know important sort of source of political patronage and power and that's basically what we're talking about yeah I find the silence on like bigger ideas kind of alarming right now I've got two more questions for our guests and then I'm searching for Sergio who's carrying a chair kind of a wrestling move over there but he'll give me an indicator where to go when you have a question as I turn it to you so in discussion the ambiguity and frustration with the regulatory lag that has come to characterize the relationship of our governance institutions with newer disruptive Technologies or maybe just technology in general let's be real I often remind my students that amidst this amazing growth and decrease in the cost of the computational power processing Big Data Etc our governance institutions that that computational power hasn't even increased with like a step function right so in contrast if anything our legislatures sit less often we pass less legislation and that creates even more competition and pressure for big capital P problems to be prioritized and frankly in the policy World by the time something a pro is a problem we probably kind of all not done our jobs very well so um did do we have the right policy environments for smart cities we I mean we probably didn't to thrive but if we did have a stronger policy environment around privacy and data governance how would that have changed some of the conversation that we were having right was this was this conversation back to that earlier question around what what we talk about when we talk about sidewalk Labs outside of smart cities are we really talking about the gray space with these other policy priorities yes check mark I mean I no I yeah like the the biggest Gap in society that this whole Saga showed us and which a significant number of the people who oppose sidewalk Labs uh were trying to say was if we want all these cool things let's make sure that human rights are protected maybe just from the beginning um and to sidewalk Labs Credit they really did try to propose Frameworks unfortunately don't want to ask them to and even the government agency Waterfront Toronto whose name I'm surprising I don't think has come up yet tonight but sorry it's all right um but the government agency the even was basically asking sidewalk like you're not supposed to be the one to put forward policy but they were trying to put ideas out there they were saying why don't we try this and then the opponents were like no we like that even less uh we want people and our governments that we've elected to come up with policy and I think that was just an interesting lesson and maybe future governments will learn from that to figure out what do we care about who makes decisions about how technology is embedded in our physical world around us I'll just say this quickly uh so I think that um what are the positive legacies That Sidewalk Labs left us with is that the debate about all of these topics that we're discussing tonight really came to the fore right you know because of you know the coverage of people like Josh and because of the activism that you know that sprang up around that this proposal that you know we really learned why Municipal governments are very challenged to regulate this stuff why our privacy laws are inadequate all of these things so we had an important lesson in uh you know you know the relationship between the policy world and these very rapidly developing Technologies and you know when I was doing the research for this project I sort of began to think in um trying to divide these Technologies into two broad categories as a way of thinking about whether they're positive or negative and the the dividing line is whether they bear on individuals or people and the movement of people or on the operation of you know Urban systems and you know like roads and um you know civil you know things the infrastructure things that are built so Energy Systems Smart Energy Systems in a world where we need to decarbonize and move to a lot you know much greater use of electricity and distributed energy really an excellent application you know monitor you know sensors and public space that you know are saying oh okay well we could figure out who's moving through a public space and when and we could you know we could optimize and change uses and blah blah not so good um so that's you know those are just two ways of thinking about what this the legacy of this project was while we're running out of time we still don't have jet packs Sergio's out in the audience he's looking for your hands up to to chase this next question from me which is my final one for the panelists um there's so much to learn from the analysis you've both done sorry for not mentioning Waterfront I did not have enough minutes um and in some ways it seems like um what Toronto takes away from the sidewalk Labs as a case study is that it may have been a failure of government relations and or a lack of appreciation for civic culture may be coupled with our policy desire for this somewhat elusive thing called Innovation um but there's a lot that other people can be learning from Toronto so what do you hope that you know internationally people around the world take away from Toronto's experience how can Toronto be constructive and productive here to the broader conversation and you know coupled with that if you want to go a different direction what should policy makers be learning from sidewalk Labs again as we go forward policymakers in cities everywhere I think need to be asking themselves the question who should benefit when you design a city of the future um I don't know if that question was asked enough when cities were first born out of the feudal system uh but I think we have a little bit more freedom now to uh ask the right questions and think who should benefit and who gets to make decisions when we're designing these things John so I think that the um so I'm glad you mentioned Waterfront Toronto so Waterford Toronto was created 20 years ago to develop the industrial Waterfront of the city that had been sort of tied up in Scandal and brownfield's mess for a long time and Waterford sidewalk Labs landed in the lab of water Waterfront Toronto for various reasons that Josh really explores in his book but the like the mismatch is really important to sort of sit with because this was essential this is It's a tri-party agency it belongs to the province the federal government the municipality it's basically a real estate Development Corporation and they were you know and they said this themselves they were incredibly uh out manned right they didn't have the policy chops to deal with the complexity of what sidewalk Labs was proposing um and the takeaway for me is that you know these are these are very powerful Technologies they do land in urban spaces but not exclusively in urban spaces but we live in a country where 80 percent of people live in cities and so it seems like the natural locus of policy making should be much higher than Municipal governments or Municipal agencies and you know that you know I think that you know you observe that and you commented on it I mean the federal government didn't really handle this one very well but it seems like that's the better place to deal with these issues because we're talking about privacy and we're talking about surveillance and all of these intrusive you know devices and Technologies thank you thank you both
2022-11-10 15:50
