Skynet emerges in Greenwich, monitoring hearts to light switches London's Greenwich Peninsula will become the testbed for new software promising to create the smart city of the future. The experiment, backed by science minister David Willetts, teams up tech houses Hitachi Consulting, Philips and McLaren Electronic Systems with Living PlanIT to work on the latter's Urban Operating System. " …
I love that the Olympics has come to one of the most decimated areas of the UK after the unfathomable (no one to blame except Council workers) credit crunch and banking colapses.
There must be literally tens of unemployed corrupt bankers living on dole, this £200bn is just what they need and reward for their dilligent work over the years.
Why don't we have the Olympics in London every 4 years as a reward, hell lets make it every year!
One of the biggest improvements you could make, by "linking things up" would be to have total control of *all* traffic lights across the city (yes, including the pedestrian ones). So that you can even out flow, and avoid the common waste of time when a set of pedestrian lights goes red, 10m after a green junction light.
However, in the name of dogma, ISTR councils aren't allowed to do anything to help private cars, but have to repeat the mantra of public transport.
Some quick Googling reveals that the Greenwich scheme is called the RAPTOR project, which is not deeply reassuring.
"It's very simple Mr Bond, if your government fails to meet my demands, I am going to reduce the Greenwich Peninsular to chaos."
"You mean you will use Living PlanIT's UOS network to manipulate the utilities, street lights and road signs?"
"No Mr Bond, I'm going to put three cones on the A102."
Skynet 1 first became operational in 1969 but failed within one year. 2A was a failure and it was decided to use thrusters to move it from orbit to a destructive earth re-entry. Later in 1974 2B was launched and was successful. Since then the project has gone from strength to strength and I sometimes find myself wondering who stole the name from whom, until I look at the Wikipedia and IMDB entries and see it was an original script. Anyhow, Skynet has always been a useful tool, though the Skynet tower and radome like cover in my time of service reminded me more of War of the Worlds than Arnie.
Smart buildings are great money makers. Get locked into a long lease. Get to pay endless hordes of service engineers to try and figure out why the smart buildings are playing dumb and everyone is randomly freezing or sweating their nadgers off. Millions of sensors around Greenwich means billions in supply and service contracts. What's not to like?
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