"the smarts in cities are always going to remain human"

Kim Stanley Robinson on what cities need to do to fight climate catastrophe:

"Talk of 'smart cities' is a little bit overblown, part of the AI craze, because the smarts in cities are always going to remain human. But a highly systematized, quantified, and automated coordination of city functions, not just transport but also inputs and outputs of all kinds of supplies and wastes, will help cities achieve the good efficiencies necessary to make them superior in carbon-burn terms.

Even after we transition to carbon neutrality or turn carbon-negative, the multiple levels of coordination necessary for cities to work will benefit from conscious study and design, extensive recording systems, quantification, and, yes, computers. The city will not become a computer, or even much like a computer, but it will use computers. The climate gains from this effort in system coordination will include a reduction in wasted resources, unnecessary transport, and recycling failures."

I love the fact that while Robinson never hesitates to tell us how bad things are, he's also never short of ideas to mitigate and hopefully solve the problem of our Earth becoming too damn hot.