Large Technical Systems: Artificial Intelligence and Future Applications in Smart Cities

Introduction

The advent of emerging technologies be it 5G, blockchain, quantum technology or artificial intelligence has shown that they have an immeasurable potential to change our lives, if not immediately. From the autonomous cars to the health care, the more technology progresses, the more we are becoming vulnerable to malicious effects of it. Cyber domain, for instance, is a significant part of political playing ground of states and non-state actors to show prowess or exert influence on third parties. Even worse, there is no global governance scheme or regulations as to how to control and use these technologies. The gap between haves and have nots —digital divide— furthers the complexity that technology imposes upon us. This, at the end of the day leads to illusory takeaways about emerging technologies. Though politically laden comments provide a snapshot of status quo in the nexus between global politics and technology, it doesn’t represent the whole reality. Rather it seems more blind men and elephant analogy that offers a little glimpse into intertwined technological systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of them. Since deep learning approach has become widely used in various realms, AI discipline gained attraction from all walks of life, though the success of deep learning is a product of more than a half century old constant failures and success. Indeed, this creates fallacy or hype around a new technology. It can be seen in latest confrontation between China and the US. The main question is whether the global system is in ongoing power shift or put it differently, is it a tech ‘cold war’? (Frey and Osborne, 2020; Wu et al., 2019). True, that Chinese technology policy is not innocent since it strives for diffuse authoritarian technologies throughout the world and represses its minority Uighur populations on the home front (Harsono, 2020; Shahbaz, 2018). The US technology is not also immune from these criticisms— even if they are not being used at an identical level— given predictive policing and algorithmic biases towards black people that have become more evident in the wake of George Floyd’s death (Benbouzid, 2019; Hale, 2020).

The crux of the matter is what we understand from technology. That is, to what extent theoretical lenses such as Hughes’ Large Technical Systems (LTS) theory help us to grasp complex relations among technology, power (political aspect) and society (Hughes, 1993). This applies to the AI-based technology development regardless of its malicious usage. In part because technology and its ramifications are path dependent that might vary at different levels. For instance, the regime type —be it liberal democracy or authoritarian— of any given country directly affects progression of technology. Furthermore, innovation ecosystem, the status of epistemic communities, collaboration between private and public sector, effective government technology strategies, ability to setting standards, research and development investments are major variables that might dramatically shift technology systems. At the end of the day, these systems are products of trajectory and paradigmatic changes, let alone being consequences of ad hoc policies or pragmatic priorities (Dosi, 198). We, therefore, investigate the AI usage in smart cities through the aspect of large technical systems. We mostly focus on Chinese AI technology development and how it affects society. Besides, we seek to find out how potential diffusion of AI usage through smart city projects might leverage authoritarian governments to sustain a grip on the power. The aim of this chapter is to provide theoretical baseline for the AI policy by using smart city applications of AI as a case study. Thus, we start with LTS theory and continue by looking at how to place AI in LTS theory. Finally, Chinese AI technologies in smart cities will be investigated through different case studies.