Vivid Sydney

Reconnecting Sydney, held during Vivid Sydney and hosted by AECOM, saw six speakers from the technology, planning, media and government backgrounds to discuss the future of the Harbour City.

Raj Vaswani, co-founder and chief technology officer, Silver Spring Networks, said the most significant  change in the next 50 years will be machine automation becoming increasingly commonplace.

“Even today, the ‘Internet of Things’ has reached a tipping point due to constantly improving processing power, communications reliability and security, and data analytics,” Mr Vaswani said.

“These underlying technological trends will continue to create more and more possibilities for things to be connected, monitored, controlled, and integrated. These massive scale, interoperating machine networks will radically augment our environment, improving health, safety, comfort, convenience and control,” he said.

The audience were asked to vote if they would allow a robot to care for them when they were elderly or sick and 97 per cent said yes.

The audience was then asked if humans would become obsolete in 50 years and 85 per cent said no.

Dr Angus Hervey, co-founder of Future Crunch said with the predicted advance of telemetry and associated technologies such as driverless cars in the next ten years, Sydney may not need as many more roads or train lines.

“This technological disruption, which is part of the larger digital revolution, will mean most of the cars become a lot more efficient and algorithms drive them more effectively. That means better traffic management, and combined with car-pooling technologies such as Uber, more passengers per car trip,” Dr Hervey said.

“Sydney is spending billions of dollars on roads that may not be necessary. Surely the city could get more bang for its buck by investing in something like the world’s most advanced data centre, as China is currently doing?”

Whether we are heading in the right direction in the planning and design of Sydney, in terms of the way we move around the city, was also discussed.

James Rosenwax, AECOM cities leader, said unlike Melbourne and Brisbane, Sydney, had been neglected in terms of investment in major pieces of infrastructure and as a result the city has not kept pace with its global peers. However, Mr Rosenwax said the city was now on the mend.

“There is a phenomenal amount of city shaping infrastructure either planned or under construction in Sydney in 2015. Examples of this include the M9 Orbital, the North West Rail Link, The Bays Precinct, Sydney Metro, Second Harbour Crossing, potential second Sydney airport and the Parramatta light rail,” he said.

“Many of these are major pieces of infrastructure that will realistically take five years to plan and then another 10 years to execute so it’s 15 years before they will be fully implemented. It’s only with these pieces of infrastructure in place, that Sydney is going to be able to keep moving and remain globally competitive,” Mr Rosenwax said.

“We do need to provide flexibility in our approach to planning the future Sydney. As we have seen in the last decade, with the advancement of technology to connect and move us, change and disruption will be very high on the agenda. Certainty in Sydney should come from the delivery of a well-integrated transport network, and it is my view that we should be prepared to allow for innovation in how we live, work and play in and around this network,” he said.

When discussing the social and ethical issues around big data, Ben Grubb, Technology editor, Fairfax Media said prior to the session, he expects data breaches will be much bigger than what we’ve seen to date and this will cause a rethink around the way we store and use data.

“Everything is hackable essentially. It’s all about mitigating risks and trying to store less data. The privacy law in Australia is basically ‘don’t store information that you don’t need to store’ but now it seems that we’ve changed our position to ‘let’s store everything, because it might be useful someday’,” he said.

“The issue with storing all this data is that it’s a honey pot for hackers. For example, we may not have thought of why someone might want our Fitbit data but I’m sure they can find a use for it, such as selling it to health or insurance companies. We could get to the stage where companies could stop providing services to people because they’re going to die soon, according to their Fitbit data,” Mr Grubb said.

“Some insurance companies are now talking about installing devices into cars to figure out if someone is putting too much pressure on the break, or if they are just driving in a weird way. Your premium could come down if you’re using that device. So if you’re opting into it, there’s a form of consent involved. Drivers from low socio economic backgrounds will use these services because they’re cheaper so it kind of creates a divide, like people will essentially have to pay for their privacy,” he said.

Audience members were asked if they trusted companies more than governments with their data and just 40 per cent voted yes.

After the panel session, the audience built their very own ‘Reconnected City’ with an interactive city simulation. Players were challenged to improve traffic congestion in a virtual city while keeping other key metrics like capital costs, water and energy consumption in balance.

The game was developed by AECOM and creative technology agency, S1T2 with data drawn from AECOM’s Sustainable Systems Integration Model (SSIM). SSIM is an integrated Geographic Information System-based design, planning and feasibility tool. It was developed to assist decision-makers and other key stakeholders to evaluate the myriad of available alternatives for balancing social, environmental and economic priorities and impacts, while ensuring a sound assessment of costs and benefits.