The Digital Edge Blog

I loved science fiction novels when I was growing up…
 
I couldn’t get enough of futuristic worlds with technologies embedded everywhere.  I wanted to live there - to be a part of those gleaming, robotic cities.  But what was just a kid’s daydream then has moved a lot closer to reality today.
 
 
Welcome to New Songdo City in South Korea…
 
New Songdo is a city being built from scratch to be completely digital.  Everyone will have a universal smart card that will be used for getting into their home and office, paying for goods and services, and accessing legal or medical records.  Living spaces will have medical sensors that will be able to monitor basic health signs that can be automatically forwarded to medical staff if the person requests it.  Traffic reports and travel guidance will be customized for each individual and coordinated - I imagine your alarm clock could wake you up 10 minutes earlier if your route to the office is congested.
 
Small embedded chips (RFID) will be used to track everything from the food in the refrigerator to bags of recycled garbage,  and GPS will let residents keep track of their children.
 
But this ‘utopia’ has a big problem…
 
Privacy. 
 
Or more specifically, how to maintain privacy in a digitally transparent society.  Making this social experiment work will require a new civil contract between the personal and the public.  There are a great many exciting benefits to be had in a completely digital world, but the risk of having personal information misused or abused is very real.  This will need to be addressed.
 
What’s interesting is that we might find we don’t really have more privacy in our current ‘non-digital’ cities.  Cell phones and swipe cards track our location, credit cards reveal our spending habits and overall lifestyle, and security cameras are recording us in most public spaces.  Realistically, we are already giving up privacy in similar ways to the future residents of New Songdo, but we are getting none of the benefits.  It’s far more subtle, and we are simply less aware of it.  It will be interesting to see where this leads, since the changes this lifestyle environment portends are profound. The issues raised here will eventually need to be addressed by every society - new or established. 
 
And while real world cities like New Songdo are a lot more complicated then the cities of the sci-fi novels I read as a kid, they are still just as exciting…