The case for the Open Smart City
Do you remember SETI@Home? It was a massive distributed search for extraterrestrial life, by analyzing specific radio frequencies emanating from space.
The SETI part is not as important as the @Home portion. It’s the idea that there is a massive amount of computing power sitting idly at homes and can be used for something useful.
The SETI@Home was perhaps the more publicized project of its kind. There were (and still are) many other ones. For instance, there’s a project working on protein folding, which is used to better understand diseases like Alzheimer's disease, cancer, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, sickle-cell anemia, and type II diabetes. Or calculating prime numbers. As a point of interest, this Folding@Home project achieved a speed of over 1 exaFLOPS - that is, surpassing the speed of the fastest supercomputers.
Why this lengthy introduction? Believe me, I’m getting there as fast as I can. I’m no exaFLOPs.
In 2020, Tesla reached a mark of 1 million cars produced. In fact, they built over 500,000 just in 2020. The estimate is that by 2030 there will be 145 million electric vehicles on the road. Given the ongoing dream of self-driving cars, the computing power in these vehicles will be massive. It will always grow as new technology (and new energy) becomes available.
Here is the opportunity that could change the world. (Maybe a business person with a good sense of strategy could even make a lot of money with it. Who knows?)
We should be using electric cars not only as a mode of transportation, but as part of a distributed network. We should utilize every possible function of that device. Much has already been written about how vehicle batteries can be used to supply electricity during the peak demand or outages. As well, sensors can collect information about road conditions and traffic (as your mobile phone does, already).
Now imagine if any idle vehicle connects to the cloud and provides a computing resource to solve problems which would under normal circumstances be too expensive.
How can cities benefit from it?
The above-mentioned data collection is about road conditions. It is far cheaper to fix small imperfections in the road than a major pothole. Both the drivers and the insurance companies will enjoy that.
Continuous traffic optimization is where the car collects information as it drives and the idle cars design individual routes for the driving ones.
During the night, we might get a breakthrough in medicine. We could find new stars, mine extra few bitcoins or optimize the pickup route for the garbage truck for the next day. There will always be something to compute.
If cities are glamouring for the Smart City title, they should involve their citizens in running the city. That means negotiating the use of the available resources and helping foster innovation.
Car companies moving from gasoline-powered engines to electric ones should demonstrate not only a commitment to improving air quality, but helping building better cities for everyone living there. And that should be the recurrent pattern.