How Alibaba’s City Brain is solving traffic congestion

A new artificial intelligence system that has cut congestion in China and is set to be rolled out to other cities around the world could also be used for surveillance, privacy campaigners have warned.

Alibaba’s City Brain uses AI to gather information from intersection cameras and GPS data on the locations of cars and buses. The platform then analyses this information in real time to coordinate road signals around the city with the aim of preventing or easing gridlock.

Alibaba’s home town of Hangzhou was once ranked as China’s fifth most congested city, but it has now dropped to 57th after a two-year trial by the ecommerce giant.

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The company says City Brain has shortened commutes, enabled fire engines and ambulances to halve their response times to emergencies, and helped track illegal parking in real time.

Last year the scheme was extended to other urban areas of China and to Kuala Lumpur, but “experts say this is just the start”, says CNN.

Tech HQ reports that Volkswagen and Siemens have teamed up to test a smart light system in VW’s German hometown of Wolfsburg.

The site says “a section of road with 10 traffic signal systems that transmit information about its light phases is expected to tell a driver, or a self-driving car of the future, when to expect a wave of green lights”.

A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2025, cities using such systems could cut commutes by an average of 15% to 20%.

Yet “with Alibaba’s city data grab come concerns about privacy and surveillance”, says Wired.

The aim, says the magazine, is “to create a cloud-based system where information about a city, and as a result everyone in it, is stored and used to control the city”.

Gemma Galdon Clavell, a social scientist working on the ethics of technology, said: “The implications are huge. There will be no oversight nor control not only of stated uses but also future uses.”

It follows a recent survey, by tech firm Tencent and Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, which found nearly 80% of respondents said they worried about the impact of AI on their privacy.

Galdon Clavell says the usefulness for citizens, in the way of improved services is not clear, but it is clear it will be valuable for profiling and commercial activities.

“What is sold as a public or safety initiative ends up using public infrastructure and the public to mine data for private uses,” she says.