Smart City Automation and its effects on the public services

Abstract

In 1807, during King George III birthday celebration in London, Frederick Winsor performed an extraordinary conjuring trick on Pall Mall. With only a single spark he lighted up the whole street. This was done thanks to a line of gas lamps, that each one was fed with gas pipes made from the barrels of old musket guns. The Mall was almost impassable with spectators until after midnight. Over the following decades, thousands gas lamps went up across London. w Suddenly, with so many gas lamps in London, there was a need for Lamplighters. he lamplighters performed a highly important role in the city and brought some measure of reassurance and safety to the residents. However, with the invention of electric light, Lamplighters were no longer needed, and today there are just five Lamplighters left in London (and 1,500 gas lamps), mainly as a tribute to the English Heritage[1].

The Lamplighters story illustrate how technological changes effects the city development. Scientific advances and new technologies often enable dramatic improvements in urban life and public services, creating new types of employment while eradicating others: according to 2016 Deloitte report 29% of admin and support services jobs, and a 72% of transport and storage roles in London, are at “high risk” of automation[2].

The majority of the processes undergoing in today cities will be automated in the future ‘smart cities’. In fact, the digital revolution has already started to change the assumptions and behaviors which characterized the industrial economy. The article will present significant implication of the automation process, and examine future development of it. Additionally, the article will highlight possible approaches to harness the automation process to benefit all the relevant and significant stakeholders: the smart city, the residents and public officials. The article aims to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable cities and communities) while taking into account the importance of cities and their broad impact on environment, social and economic aspects (the three pillars of Sustainable Development).

Smart City Automation in the decade to come

“Digital technologies are doing for human brainpower what the steam engine and related technologies did for human muscle power during the Industrial Revolution”(Andrew McAfee) [3].

This quote by Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, is a good starting point for understanding the near future of automation. It leads to the appreciation that assumptions and behaviors which characterized the industrial economy are being changed by the digital revolution, just as assumptions and fundamental behaviors that held true for agricultural societies were changed by the Industrial Revolution [4].

Looking at United States it is clear that the nation is going through a generation-long structural shift in labor, productivity, jobs, and salaries. It started in the 1980’s and is expected to accelerate due to the increasing adoption of advanced robotics and machine learning technologies. Already today we are witnessing what might be the most important changes in the nature of work since the Industrial Revolution, which will affect nearly everything, from crime to electoral outcomes to national competitiveness. One direct implication of this is that some types of jobs will disappear and others will emerge.

The automation development, or one might say process, is happening in every aspect of our life, from communication to health, and even governance (with E-voting for example). Nevertheless, the article will focus on the automation process that already started to gain momentum in the context of ‘Smart Cities’, for two main reasons. First, cities have wide impact on environment, social and economic aspects (also known as the three pillars of Sustainable Development). In addition, cities have greater importance due to stronger urbanization tendency. In 2008 (for the first time) more than 50% of all people lived in urban areas (3.3 billion), that is expected to rise to 70% by 2050 [5]. In Europe, 75% of the population already lives in urban areas and the number is expected to reach 80% by 2020. The magnitude of the urbanization trend, and its future development, leading to the fact that already today most resources are consumed in cities worldwide, contributing to their economic importance, but also to their poor environmental performance[6].

This lead directly to the second reason for cities to be in the center of attention. Cities, and particularly ‘Smart cities’, are the perfect lab to test new approaches and to examine thing in a smaller scale, before implementing them in the national and international level.

There is a variety of definition of ‘Smart City’ and many time the concept is used in inconsistent ways. Moreover, there is neither a single template of framing a smart city, nor a one-size-fits-all definition of it. This article will use the British Standards Institute (BSI) definition: “the effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens”[7].

The BSI definition pots the focus on ‘effective integration’. The first aspect of the integration can be seen in the smart bins project by Ecube Labs. The South Korean company produces solar-powered, smart waste bins which allow cities to monitor the levels of rubbish in each bin. Once the bin is full it notifies the collection crews, which in turn send rubbish trucks to empty it. This way, the trucks can go to areas where they are needed, rather than having to stick to set routes[8].

A further development in this regard has been made by the Volvo Group in collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology and Mälardalen University in Sweden, and Penn State University in the United States. In their joint venture (called ROAR, for Robot-based Autonomous Refuse handling) a robot that can automatically collect bins from the street and deliver them to a waiting rubbish truck was developed[9].

The second aspect of the integration is to be found in the public transport system. In 2016 the Swiss city of Sion began a two-year trial for autonomous buses. This project is managing by the startup BestMile[10], and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne is contributing to the improvement of the technology for better control and routing. The project adopted a unique approach that suited to a network of vehicles running on known routes: the network controls the buses “the same way a control tower does in an airport,” according to BestMile. The hub-and-shuttle model of the project can be proved as an excellent alternative to the other commonly imagined scenario of driverless fleets (as a robotic Uber network). In addition, it could offer a good level of convenience but without putting so many vehicles on the road. Moreover, it is easier to drive buses on known routes, because they can have detailed internal maps of those routes instead of having to assess road conditions on the fly.

Another example is the world’s first driverless bus service that began carrying passengers in French city of Lyon[11].

This trend already spread to US with the Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon, California (uses French robo-buses to ferry passengers around), and the new on-demand ‘driverless buses’ system in Los Angeles (driverless shuttles will come on demand to riders, through the use of an app, and the shuttles optimize routes and pick up other people on the way)[12].

It will come as no surprise that buses will be the first step for driverless vehicles in cities, especially in Europe, where municipal public transport is already well-used in most big cities.

The third aspect of the integration might be automation of infrastructure repairs. Researchers at the University of Leeds are leading a pioneering £4.2m project to create “self-repairing cities” by developing robots that can fix streetlights and potholes. The researchers are developing small robots to identify problems with utility pipes, streetlights and roads and fix them with minimal disruption to the public. The initial robots will include drones that can perch on streetlights to carry out repairs, drones that can fix potholes and robots within utility pipes to perform inspections and repairs. Professor Phil Purnell, who leads the school of civil engineering research team at Leeds University, compared these machines to a city’s “white blood cells”, repairing the damage before it requires a major intervention. The project will also track the social, environmental, political and economic impact of these new technologies in the city[13].

The last aspect is back-office administration functions. Nowadays robotic process automation (RPA is an emerging form of clerical process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence workers) is beginning to be apply to those roles. The RPA mimics human interaction with computer systems for repetitive tasks such as signing people up for council tax direct debit payments.

In 2016 Enfield council’s announced their decision to recruit an AI to deliver local authority servicesas part of a joint venture with IPsoft, an American artificial intelligence company[14]. The new employee, called Amelia, will work on frontline council services, taking resident queries, handling requests for permits and authenticating licenses. The new “cognitive agent” personality and social skills are based on natural language processing, whereby computers learn how to interpret the emotion expressed in a human voice, so as to know how to respond appropriately. The hope is that callers won’t even notice that they are not dealing with a human [15].

The Singaporean government, in partnership with Microsoft, is also planning to roll out intelligent chat-bots in several stages: at first, they will answer simple factual questions from the public, then help them complete tasks and transactions, before finally responding to personalized queries[16].

This automation is justified in the same way as any new technology of the past 200 years: it reduces the need for boring, tedious labor, freeing up human beings to do more complex and enjoyable tasks. If call center operatives can be replaced by robots, then employees can focus on more subtle forms of dialogue, judgment and interaction.

Possible implication of the Smart City Automation

The review of the latest developments in the field of ‘Smart Cities’ automation shows that the near future is exciting and promising. Nevertheless, this process will have significant consequences on the performance of work in the public sector of the city and on the future of the public service workforce.

There is still great uncertainty regarding how fully the dream of automation can be realized. However, a 2013 report estimates that 47% of US jobs are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years[17]. The Deloitte report found that in London, 29% of admin and support services jobs, and a whopping 72% of transport and storage roles, are at “high risk” of automation.

This process as already started as over the past decades, computers have substituted for a number of jobs, including the functions of bookkeepers, cashiers and telephone operators. The Smart City automation process could possibly influence some of the aspects of integration that were presented in the previous section. Regarding the smart bins, taking into consideration driverless technology, and its future development, it’s easy to see how refuse collectors might follow lamp lighters into the obscure past of urban life.

The automation of the public transport system is making it easy to assume where old municipal jobs might vanish. In London, driverless buses have the potential to supplant London’s 22,500 bus drivers. Moreover, the Transport for London (TfL) also unveiled 250 “driverless” tube trains which should come into service from 2022. Initially the new trains will still have drivers, though in the longer-term they may be redeployed as fully autonomous[18].

The automation of infrastructure repairs will necessarily lead to a reduction in the number of road workers needed. However, as Professor Purnell said, putting road workers out of work is absolutely not the objective of the project, “What we need is the people who are doing tasks that are fairly dull and don’t need much skill freed up to attack the real infrastructure problems, of which there are hundreds upon hundreds that we are burying our heads in the sand about”.

Finally, apply robotic process automation to back-office administration functions, as Amelia is due to be 60% cheaper than a human employee, it will be very useful facing future budget cuts. Nevertheless, the council claims it has no plans to get rid of its 50 call center workers.

While some jobs are threatened by redundancy and others expected to grow rapidly, existing jobs are also going through a change in the skill sets required to do them. Meaning that, as Professor Purnell pointed out, that the “free” worker will have to be up-skilled to carry out more fulfilling work. But whether everyone can be “up-skilled”, and how many staff will actually be needed as robots take on more routine tasks, remains to be seen.

Despite plentiful commentary and speculation about the effects of the public services transformation no concrete evidences are present regard what that will actually be the future of the public service workforce: How it might look like, the challenges that it will face, the roles that public servants will undertake, the skills that will be needed, and implications for education, development and recruitment[19].

Possible solution

Cities and their citizens are shaped by the forces of innovation and technology. Today, and considerably more in the future, digital technologies will have shaping power of our urban way of life. A feasible scenario could be that a giant tech company (as Google or IBM) does eventually manage to create an artificial general intelligence which successfully performs any task a human can. This will lead to job losses that would dwarf anything we have seen before.

The upcoming developments should not intimidate leaders and policy makers. On the contrary, this need to be seen as an opportunity to improve and take another step toward a real ‘Smart City’ and implementing a true sustainable development agenda. It will be, and might even already now, a long term process, that will have to cope with a number of fundamental aspects.

The first aspect will have to be changing the way we think, understand, set expectation and demands, and evaluate the outcomes. In other words, the nature of the work conducted as part of the public service of the city. The automation and technological developments can, and should, provide the opportunity to ‘free’ humans from the tedious, monotonous, singular tasks jobs many of the employees obliged to do today. In particular, considering the fact that these narrowly defined jobs will be the first to be displaced by robots because single-task robots are just the easiest kinds to build. David Lee has offered an astounding example – the call center agent[20]. In the last few years, most of the agent brainpower has been redirect to a computer software and the call center agent just clicks on screens and read scripts for most of his day. The agent act more like machines than humans. And unfortunately, over the next few years, as technology gets more advanced, the call center agent, along with others (like clerks and securities), will see the vast majority of their work disappear. But there is a good side to this liberation process as it will allow allocating much more complex tasks to the working people, and to create new jobs that are less centered on the tasks that a person does and more focused on the skills that a person brings to work. This will necessarily demand that these officials will have more skills, or will be equipped with a new set of skills, which is the second aspect. The focus must be on the public servant set of skills, which should include more softer nature skills (as communication, collaboration, and political judgment), alongside some harder and technical skills. As Dickinson and Sullivan stated: “ In some ways, these kinds of skills are a return to traditional notions of public service and those associated with bureaucratic stewardship”[21]. To provide public servant with those kinds of skills will not be an easy task, mainly due to the fact that they are developed through practice and experience, and not only through training programs. One way to achieve this can be to establish an ‘exchange’ program with private companies. Meaning that public servant will be placed in positions inside the private company for a specified period, during which they will gain skills and knowledge.

One of the most important features of this new set of skill has to be creativity, as robots are great at repetitive and constrained work, but human beings have an amazing ability to bring together capability with creativity when faced with problems that have never seen before. I believe that the primary barrier to innovation is not a lack of ideas or a lack of talent, but an empowerment problem. This is closely connected to the third aspect, the cultural factors. In order for the two previous aspect to be put into practice the organization culture of the public service in the city must change. The public service workforce will have to be supported by an organizational and institutional culture that fosters and rewards the roles and skills that have be identified and which accords public service workers some agency in the process of re-imagining the service.

The last aspect, it to focus on citizens center approach. Traditionally, the public administration and services of the city have been seen as a passive vehicle for executing social policy mandated by legislation and regulation. However today, as every other organization, it faces the challenge of how to provide better services to its customers (citizens and businesses), that view the public sector as another provider of ‘services’, services for which they pay taxes[22].

One way to achieve this aim is to harvest the data captured by the city administration, which is a resource and an asset, and to collaborate with the private sector. This will allow to better identify citizens and business’s needs, find creative and adapted solution and implement them in the best possible way. Hopefully, improving the city services will fuel the local entrepreneurial environment and will promote growth[23].

Conclusion

The automation process of the smart city is inevitable as technology continue to develop. The first part of the article presented some of the close-future development in this field, as smart bins, driverless public transportation, autonomous infrastructure repairs, and automation of back-office administration functions. As the future of this field is still largely unknown, this developments might be just the tip of the iceberg.

The second part presented few possible implications of the automation process for the smart city, mainly regarding the development which were presented in the first part. This lead to the third part which adopted the approach that the automation process should not deter public officials and policy maker regarding the future. Instead the automation process should be seen as an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the provided services, to strengthen the relations with the residents (mainly by building trust) and to upgrade officials career (and might even restore public service ethos). In particular, it is an exciting opportunity for cities to better serve citizens and also support new job creation.

In order to do so the focus must be on the Human factor, meaning all the people involves in the work of the public sector: Public officials (will need to equip themselves with the appropriate capabilities in futures thinking) and the residents (more participation and collaboration with them). In other words, the spotlight have to move from ‘Public Sector’ to ‘Service to the public’.

In order to truly benefit from the automation process of the smart city a plan must be formulate and action must be taken. As Peter Drucker wrote: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”.

NOTES

1. Laura Freeman, “The most magical job in Britain”, The Daily Mail, November 24, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2848038/The-magical-job-Britain-Enchanting-story-gas-street-lights-five-men-burning-just-did-Dickens-day.html

2. Transformers How machines are changing every sector of the UK economy, Deloitte LPP, 2016.

3. Andrew McAfee, “The Great Decoupling”, interview by Amy Bernstein and Anand Raman, Harvard Business Review, June 2016, https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling

4. Bret Boyd, “The great divide: meeting the challenges of our future workforce”, Grayline Group, February 26, 2017, https://graylinegroup.com/great-divide-future-workforce/

5. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/352).

6. Vito Albino, Umberto Berardi & Rosa Maria Dangelico, “Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives”, Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 22 , Iss. 1, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2014.942092

7. The British Standards Institution, “Smart cities framework – Guide to establishing strategies for smart cities and communities”, PAS 181, 2014.

8. “Clean CAP”, Product Information, Ecube Labs, accessed December 2, 2017, http://ecubelabs.com/integrated-waste-management/ultrasonic-fill-level-sensor/

9. Per-Lage Götvall, “Robot based Autonomous Refuse handling, Volvo Transport Solutions, January 27, 2017, http://www.skmf.nu/material/mk17pres/2E_ROAR_Per-Lage_Gotvall.pdf

10. SMARTSHUTTLE“, System Information, BestMile SA, accessed December 2, 2017 https://bestmile.com/

11. David Chazan, “World’s first driverless bus service begins carrying passengers in French city of Lyon”, The Telegraph, September 3, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/03/worlds-first-driverless-bus-service-begins-carrying-passengers-i/

12. Francesca Perry, “Los Angeles to get on-demand ‘driverless buses’”, The Guardian, April 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/29/los-angeles-beverly-hills-on-demand-driverless-buses-electric-shuttles

13. “Self Repairing Cities”, Project Information, University of Leeds, UCL,

14. University of Birmingham, University of Southampton and EPSRC, accessed December 4, http://selfrepairingcities.com/

15. Roland Moore-Colyer, “Enfield Council recruits its first robot worker: AI-powered Amelia”, Computing, June 16, 2016, https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2461812/enfield-council-recruits-its-first-robot-worker-ai-powered-amelia

16. “Amelia”, Project Information, IPsoft Inc., accessed December 4, https://www.ipsoft.com/amelia/

17. Duncan Jefferies, “The automated city: do we still need humans to run public services?”, The Guardian, SEPTEMBER 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/20/automated-city-robots-run-public-services-councils

18. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation? September 17, 2013, Oxford Martin School, https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

19. Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, “’Driverless’ Tube trains: See inside TfL’s new fleet for London Underground”, The Independent”, October 9, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/driverless-tube-trains-see-inside-tfls-new-london-underground-fleet-9785034.html

20. Helen Dickinson and Helen Sullivan, Imagining the 21st Century Public Service Workforce, Melbourne School of Government, p. 3, 2014.

21. David Lee, “Why jobs of the future won’t feel like work”, filmed July 2017 at TED@UPS, SCADShow in Atlanta, Georgia, video, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_lee_why_jobs_of_the_future_won_t_feel_like_work/transcript

22. Dickinson and Sullivan, Imagining the 21st Century Public Service Workforce, p. 57

23. PricewaterhouseCoopers, “The road ahead for public service delivery”, Public Sector Research Centre, 2007, https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/psrc/pdf/the_road_ahead_for_public_service_delivery.pdf

24. Jen Hawes-Hewitt and Simon Giles, “Tomorrow’s City Hall: Catalysing the digital economy”, Delivering Publice Service for the Future, Accenture Consulting, p. 3, 2016.