PAMETNI GRADOVI – DIGITALNA TRANSFORMACIJA URBANOG SVETA ŽIVOTA

The narrowing of the meaning of the term intelligence–from understanding, knowledge, wisdom, and insight to the purely operational sense of “manipulating” concepts, information, and the skill of data gathering–has been evident since the late Middle Ages, when the term began to split into intellectual and “espionage” domains. How, then, do we understand intelligence today? What is the relationship between intelligence and cleverness, or wisdom? What is the essence of intelligence, and how does the phenomenon of artificial intelligence relate to “natural” intelligence–namely human, and potentially even animal intelligence (if such a discourse is meaningful at all)? These are fundamental questions, and one of the pragmatic-political reasons for their importance lies in the current trend of extending the concept of intelligence to encompass all aspects of the human world–ultimately allowing it to permeate and take form within the sphere of lived experience through total digitalization. Informed by historical–or more precisely, revolutionary–experience, we know that universal conceptual claims often give rise to totalitarian tendencies in practice. One of the more recent endeavors of this kind is the notion of smart cities, in which every element of the urban system is to be digitalized and thus subjected to control, surveillance, and processing by artificial intelligence. From this follows the need to investigate the potential for digital totalitarianism enabled by the application of AI, with the smart city serving as its first experimental ground. The central question is: Does the digital transformation of urban life open the path toward a digital utopia, or are we instead facing the emergence of digital totalitarianism?