They’re on buses, atop buildings, in parks, and inside drains as part of the island’s vision to become the world’s first “Smart Nation.” But what do they mean for privacy?
This post is part of a CityLab series on open secrets—stories about what’s hiding in plain sight.
Armed with a deep pool of tech entrepreneurs and startups—not to mention a government that’s eager to make the most use out of them—the island-nation of Singapore offers a wealth of urban innovation.
Today’s Singapore provides free WiFi inside subway stations, and it’s paved the way for its first driverless taxis. With limited access to fresh water, the city-state has also developed technology to catch rain and desalinate some 100 million gallons of seawater a day. Even its fabled fancy bus stops get a dose of high technology.
Then there are the sensors, cameras, and GPS devices. They’re on trains, buses, and taxis, tracking traffic and employing artificial intelligence to predict crashes. You can spot them around public spaces to monitor safety and crowd density, and atop buildings to monitor air quality and pedestrian movement. But that’s just the beginning.
In short, Singapore is a city—and nation—of sensors, barely noticeable to the average citizen. But they know they’re there. It’s all part of the government’s plan to become the world’s first “Smart Nation,” which was kick-started in 2014 with the rollout of 1,000 sensors. In the grand scheme, Singapore wants to build a network of sensors to collect and connect data from all aspects of urban life—not just traffic and infrastructure but also human movement and behavior. All that information, collected across various departments, will then feed into a central platform, accessible to all governmental agencies. The engineers behind it have dubbed the plan “E3A,” for “Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, All the Time.”
Already, developers are working on systems that can detect, for example, if someone is smoking in a non-smoking area. And recently the government piloted a program using wireless sensor technology inside private homes to track the movements and sleeping patterns of older residents, as part of an effort to better safeguard the health of the growing aging population. It’s even hoping to harness artificial intelligence to help the government predict what services an individual needs.
“One of the most important things we want to use AI for is a thing called ‘Moments of Life,’” Mark Lim, director of product design in Singapore’s new digital agency GovTech, told the Centre of Public Impact in February. “The idea behind this was instead of asking citizens to go to different government websites and different apps, we could anticipate the services they require at key moments in life by using AI.”
And that central platform? By the end of this year, Singapore hopes to have launched Virtual Singapore—essentially a $73 million digital model of the entire city built by the French company Dassault Systèmes. It looks something like SimCity, with 3D renderings of buildings, parks, and waterways to help policymakers and urban planners visualize the data.
In this simulation, planners can zoom in on actual buildings to analyze their real-world energy use, or spot trends in, say, noise and pollution levels. They can simulate emergencies and test out possible solutions or explore the impact of the built environment on shadows and temperature over a particular area. Perhaps in the future, it can help planners detect the spread of disease based on the commuting patterns, or predict manmade disasters, all of which would put the government one step ahead of any surprises that might crop up.
With such advanced technology in the works, Singapore is easily the envy of aspiring smart cites across the globe. It’s even more impressive considering that just 50 years ago, the island was little more than a swamp; the GDP per capita was $500.
