In Light of Recent Events, Smart Cities May Not Be. NVIDIA's "Slightly Terrifying" Metropolis Platform

I'm starting to wonder if the technocrats are as smart as they think they are.

As noted in the intro to December's No, Google's Sidewalk Labs Doesn't Want To Take Over Urban Transit. Yet. (GOOG):

No, they have bigger plans.
There is big money and big politics behind this stuff and this June 2016 article is a good primer on what's coming....

More after the jump.

From New Atlas:

Nvidia's slightly terrifying Metropolis platform paves the way for smarter cities

Nvidia has a vision for the city of the future, and it takes the always-on surveillance we're becoming accustomed to and pushes it to whole new levels. The company's Metropolis intelligent video analytics platform applies deep learning to constantly process and contextualize the masses of data streaming from the ever-increasing number of cameras watching us every day.
It's one thing to have cameras watching at all times, but another altogether to do something useful with the giant stack of data they're producing day and night. Manpower costs make sitting and watching it all unfeasible, but computers taking advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence could. And this perfectly lines up with the new direction Nvidia has been pushing in for the last few years.

Nvidia's Metropolis is an intelligent video analytics platform that can process enormous amounts of security camera footage looking for patterns and usable data(Credit: Nvidia)

No longer just a graphics card manufacturer aiming to push more pixels in the latest first person shooter, Nvidia's video processing and machine learning chips are starting to become benchmarks in a number of growing industries. For example, in industrial drones they're helping to automatically recognize and track assets on large work sites, and in self-driving cars they're taking a "watch and learn" approach to figuring out how traffic works.

Now Nvidia believes there's an opportunity to use AI, deep learning and a gushing firehose of data to monitor and optimize the entire organism of a city. And it's working toward that goal with Metropolis. This platform encompasses a number of Nvidia products all operating on a unified architecture, which can come together to analyze and make sense of video in real time....MORE

Recently:

"Google wants to build a city" (GOOG)

Trends to Watch: "Can mayors actually rule the world?":

In low-key but very persistent ways technocrats* have been aiming at this target for years and now it seems to be gathering some momentum. Here's a good introduction by Harvard's Diane Davis....

*A couple years ago John Dizard, writing at the Financial Times, quoted one of the definitions of technocracy and used it as a jumping off point to discuss Europe's relations with Greece:

Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent . . . There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance or financiers, rackets or racketeers

-The Technocrat, September 1938

A recurrent delusion of global investors is the notion that national politicians’ threats to confiscate or lock up their capital can be ignored because a “technocrat” is in charge of the ministry of finance or the central bank or whatever. This belief defies the evidence of history. “Technocrats” are the people most likely to talk you out of your money, since, after all, they went to school with you, dress like you and will join you in behind-closed-doors mockery of the populists.

And they will be just as cosmopolitan when they restructure the bonds they have sold you....

-"The eurozone should beware Greek technocrats bearing gifts"- Jan. 16. 2015

"Gadabout Urbanist Richard Florida Has a New Book..."

"It advises cities on what to do about problems that result from advice he gave them in his previous books...