The Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Autonomous City

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now mediating key urban services and infrastructures. As portrayed in recent studies, the “autonomous city” also known as the “algorithmic city” can be understood as a city where urban artificial intelligences perform tasks and take on roles which have traditionally been the domain of humans. For example, while autonomous cars transport people and drones deliver goods, large-scale AIs, such as city brains, can potentially govern entire cities. This literature stakes out a number of questions related to the meaning of intelligence, for both humans and machines. For instance, we have to ask what human intelligence means, as we seek to define AI at the same time. Moreover, as humans are shifted to new sectors of the economy or pushed aside by algorithms creating new ways of seeing and governing the city, we need to ask what kinds of cities we are making when increasingly autonomous systems are operating in place of human decisions