Reading List: Smartest Cities, Government Friction, and Robot Wars

Three of North America’s 10 “smartest” cities — those investing in tech and chief innovation officers, among other things — are in California, according to a report.

San Diego rings in at No. 1, with a big emphasis on efficiency and connectivity. The city has installed tens of thousands of LED streetlights and hundreds of sensors to improve traffic flow, cut energy waste and slash operating costs. (The city’s innovative chief information officer, Jonathan Behnke, was featured in a Techwire interview in 2017.)

The second California city cited in the report is San Francisco. “New initiatives include sensors that give buses priority at traffic lights, smart parking meters that change pricing based on demand, and an app-based payment system for transit riders.”

Rounding out the state’s troika is San Jose, the beneficiary of its proximity to Silicon Valley. “The city is bracing for an expansion of Google into its midst, and San Jose is already facing a housing affordability crisis,” the report says. “The city is developing a website to help renters apply for affordable housing, plus a data dashboard to track rent-controlled housing and prevent tenants from becoming victims of rent and housing code violations.”

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Here's a provocative look at the friction that sometimes occurs between new tech companies and the regulatory agencies that have held sway: “Exponential Government - A primer on the new exponential landscape impacting government — and how government agencies can keep up.” It’s an ambitious title for an ambitious examination of the sometimes-fraught ways startups and government interact. The piece, authored by e.Republic’s* chief innovation officer, Dustin Haisler, and its chief content officer, Paul W. Taylor, poses the premise: “Rather than fighting the inevitability of change, what would it look like if government embraced it?”

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And here’s an in-your-face premise: “A multinational technology company based in China with no U.S. employees applied for and received a $1.2 million tax credit from the state of California. The company used the money to open a Silicon Valley office that is conducting R&D for automated vehicles — all of which will be manufactured abroad. In exchange for the tax credit, the company agreed to hire a handful of engineers to develop equipment that could eliminate jobs for frontline workers.”

With this week’s rhetoric between the U.S. and China on trade, it’s an especially topical point: How do we keep robots from taking our jobs?

*e.Republic is the parent company of Techwire.