Why digital ethics must be central to smart cities

Emilie Sundorph, Programme Manager for Digital Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at techUK, explains why maintaining smart cities is linked to digital ethics

The nature of modern technology, changing how we do almost everything at a rapid pace, makes it an area ripe for ethical investigation. Approaches taken to the development and deployment of technologies today will shape both our near and distant future, and as the impact of technology grows, so does the need for digital ethics to be embedded from the very first conception of an idea to its ongoing day-to-day use.

The greater the impact of technologies, the greater the need to think of their ethical implications; the motivation to use them to improve people’s lives increases, but there could also be a higher risk of causing considerable harm if anything goes wrong.

Ethical potential
Smart cities provide great examples of the ways technology can be used to improve citizens’ everyday lives. While there’s no single definition, using technological innovation to improve the lives of inhabitants is central to the idea of a smart city. Such innovation can be applied to almost any service imaginable in a city; from transportation and air quality monitoring, to waste management and security.

These applications often improve our environments in ways that go mostly unnoticed by the average citizen but can have major significance. One techUK member, Telespazio, is developing technically and commercially viable satellite technologies to detect water leaks and improve gas pipeline monitoring, which could reduce the significant current levels of water leakage, as well as improve the safety of gas pipelines. Another member, Mind Foundry, is using geospatial AI to optimise the placement of charging stations for electric vehicles, continually updating forecasts to ensure changing trends in the data are taken into account.  

As these and countless other examples show, a large part of the smart city agenda is to lower carbon emissions make the places we live in more environmentally friendly. In these cases the focus is on reducing water wastage and encourage greater use of electric vehicles, but the potential extends much more widely; smart city technologies can for example enable greater rates of ride-sharing, improve traffic management or optimise energy efficiency.

As such, the ethical benefits of smart cities are not only in the immediate conveniences to current inhabitants, but also include the safeguarding of the environment for future generations.

However, this wide reach of smart city technologies also requires careful consideration of its ethical risks. In the case of smart cities, areas important to consider include how to approach transparency, as well as carefully considering impacts across different population groups.

Transparency and communication
With technologies used in public spaces and for essential services, the importance of giving citizens a chance to understand how and when they are deployed increases. Transparency is a well-established principle in digital ethics, and often linked closely to accountability. In a democratic society, inhabitants of a city have the right to access information about how it is run, including the use of technologies. Finding the right levels of transparency – protecting any commercial sensitivities and providing information which is meaningful to average citizens – is not an easy feat. Still, national, and local governments are trying to make progress.

The UK government is currently trialling one approach, through the Algorithmic Transparency Standard, which asks public sector bodies to provide tiers of information depending on the interests and levels of expertise of the audience. The aim of the standard is to empower citizens in their interactions with algorithms and is informed by a public engagement study to determine the kinds of information required.

Another approach is found in the City of Amsterdam, which has adopted a mandatory register of sensors as part of a data strategy. The requirement to register applies both to new and existing sensors, and anyone can now access a map showing where and what data is collected from sources such as cameras, air quality and traffic sensors and smart billboards.

These efforts to put the principle of transparency into action are only likely to increase, and any provider or adopter of smart city technologies should consider how inhabitants and visitors can access an appropriate and relevant range of information about the products and services which affect them.

Equality
In addition to securing the right level of transparency, adopters of smart city technologies need to consider if their impact will result in fair treatment of all inhabitants. For a technology to be ethical, it is not enough for it to have a positive impact on average. It is also crucial to consider how its impact is distributed – to check whether benefits are felt equally, and even more importantly whether anyone is actually being harmed by its deployment.

One such risk in a smart city is within public safety, where some groups may be disproportionately likely to be flagged as a threat. Studies have repeatedly shown that facial recognition technologies, for example, tend to be less accurate for people of colour and women, which could result in discriminatory practices.

A common tool in trying to uncover any inequities in the impact of policies are impact assessments, which can be used in any area from environmental to housing strategies. There is growing interest in conducting so-called algorithmic impact assessments which would give those developing and deploying algorithms tools to consider the impact of a system using algorithms. Recent research outlines current practices within algorithmic impact assessments in detail, and specifically proposes how they could be used to allow researchers access to public health data.

To make sure no one is disadvantaged by living in a smart city, algorithmic and broader technological impact assessments might be a good place to start for those adopting smart city tools and services.

Committing to responsible tech
With both the use of smart city technology and the interest in digital ethics on the increase, initiatives to demonstrate responsible use of technology are also becoming more popular. In London two charters have been launched even just within the last year; the Emerging Technology Charter for London and the London Data Charter, both of which aim to provide principles for successful and trustworthy use of technologies to improve the city.

More formalised ways of committing to responsible use of technologies have also been created. One example is the third party certification scheme rolled out by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner, which recently certified two police forces’ use of surveillance cameras on drones. Formal routes to show compliance with ethical standards are set to grow, as the government is for example focused on growing an AI assurance ecosystem. This will have purposes broader than ethics, including quality assurance, but it can provide ways for those developing and deploying AI to show that they have considered and avoided preventable ethical pitfalls. The use of such schemes will hopefully earn greater public trust in AI and other technologies over time.

Smart cities have enormous potential to create better, more sustainable places for people to live and visit. With digital ethics as part of the equation, we can also make sure innovation serves all inhabitants equally, and that they are given a chance to understand the technologies which impact their lives.