Today I visited the Guide to the network society conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I attended a session on the digitization of cities, in which it became clear to me that cities are going to a major change. Due to digital communication and e-commerce, the need for a main city center with shops and facilities like banks has decreased drastically. Because of this, the way we look at urban development is changing.
An interesting talk was given by Eduardo Diaz on the work of GeoCraft. In this research minecraft is used as a tool for children to gather ideas on how do develop their new neighborhood. This can help the municipalities and government agencies better develop urban areas. I see this as a sort of gamified crowdsourcing, with the interesting aspect that rather than developing their own platform they used a game that many children already play. Using an existing platform can be a valuable approach for our crowdsourcing research. Though, limitations can arise with the functionality and design of such platform. Nevertheless, there are many games and forums where enthusiasts share their knowledge to form a sort collective intelligence. I believe this can be a valuable source of information for government agencies, which will become more important in the future.
The second session was about the success and doom scenarios of intelligent computers. Guszti Eiben, Zoltán Szlávik and Noel Sharkey each presented both their hypothetical success story and the worst case outcome of the recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics. Guszti presented his view on the possibility of killer robots and the ethical responsibilities we have as researchers. From his work on evolutionary computing, he learned it is essential that in the future we allow robots to reproduce only in a centralized system. This allows the evolution of robotics to be stopped by disabling the central replication, in the case it were ever to become hostile to humanity. Zoltan made an interesting statement that it is not intelligent robots that threaten the future of humanity, but it is humans that will try to abuse power with these robots. Nevertheless his experience is that robots are already have a positive contribution to society, for instance in education and helping the elderly.