智能城市未来只有变得更加智能

在未来，智能城市会带来很多好处，比如减少污染和提高交通系统效率。但是，在《财富》杂志最近举办的科技头脑风暴大会上，一个专家小组称，智能城市也可能给我们带来许多未曾意料到的后果。

本周的早些时候，来自能源、交通、政府、金融和其他行业的专家们汇聚一堂，讨论了时下大家最关心的话题，其中被多次提及的一个迫切问题是，如何防止黑客入侵日益数字化的智能电网系统和运输网络。

银泉网络公司是一家位于硅谷的智能电网公司。首席执行官麦克·贝尔称：“很多城市的政府部门在采购时，会选择最便宜的，而不是最安全的。那些做采购决策的人不了解技术。”

1Concern是一家利用人工智能对自然灾害带来的潜在损失进行评估的公司。其首席执行官阿罕默德·万尼也持相同的看法，他认为：“政府有责任至少对这些技术进行审查。”

并非只有覆盖整个城市的智能技术容易成为攻击对象。这次圆桌会议也提到了家庭智能电器的问题。在“物联网”环境中，所有东西都与家庭网络相连，许多人甚至不知道自己可能已经暴露在黑客的攻击范围中。

智能城市可能会带来的另一个意想不到的后果是什么？如果自动驾驶的车辆成为主流，人类将会逐渐学得比机器更聪明，所以有可能在城市中心造成大量的混乱。比方说，人们走在无人驾驶汽车的前面是不会被车撞到的，因为这种汽车被设定的程序就是，当感知到有人在车辆前方时，车辆就自动停下来。但是，那些位于它们后方的车辆会做什么样的反应呢？

许多专家认为，要想解决这些日益迫近的问题（不管是好是坏），政府和公司之间应该开展公私合作（PPP）。（财富中文网）

译者：Amelia Huang

In the future, smart cities will likely bring about many benefits, like less pollution and more efficient transportation systems. But they could also bring about many unintended consequences, according to a panel of speakers at Fortune’s recent Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo.

The group of experts from energy, transportation, government, finance, and other sectors gathered to debate the top-of-mind topic earlier this week. One of the most pressing questions that repeatedly came up was how to keep hackers from breaching increasingly digitized smart grid systems and transportation networks.

“A lot of cities are buying what’s cheapest, not what’s most secure,” said Mike Bell, CEO of Silicon Valley-based smart grid company Silver Spring Networks.“People who are making buying decisions don’t understand the technology.”

Ahmad Wani, CEO of 1Concern agreed: “Cities have to have the responsibility to at least vet these technologies.” (1Concern uses artificial intelligence to assess potential damages from natural disasters.)

It’s not only city-wide, municipal technologies that could be vulnerable to attack. The roundtable also touched on home appliances—in an “Internet of Things” environment, where everything is connected to home networks, many people don’t even know that they may be exposing themselves to hackers.

Another unintended consequence of smarter cities? If autonomous vehicles become more mainstream, people could learn to outsmart the robots, creating mass confusion in urban centers. For example, if people walk in front of a driverless car, it won’t hit them—it is programmed to stop if it sees pedestrians in its path. But what about the car behind them?

The solution, according to many of the panelists, is public/private partnerships that work toward solving some of these looming issues—the good and the bad.