Xiongan: The first artificial intelligence city in human history?

In the fifth year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty (1878), in order to welcome US President Grant when he passed by Shanghai, the British in Shanghai specially shipped a small engine generator to "light up" the Bund for two nights. This was the first time that electricity was used in China. . Four years later, the Zhapu Road Electric Light Factory owned by the British-owned Shanghai Electric and Light Company began to generate electricity. This was the first power plant to officially generate electricity on Chinese soil. From then on, the human power revolution began to benefit China.

Talking about this period of history, I suddenly thought of a question: common sense is that the urban development model relies on technology and industrial revolution. People have also reached a consensus that as the biggest driving force of the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence will be like that of the past. Like electricity, it has become an infrastructure that changes urban construction and economic development, and has become the "reinforced concrete" of the information age. In this case, who is the first city in China and even the world to fully incorporate AI into its governance system? Recently, I heard a bold and reasonable idea in the industry: Xiongan.

It is not difficult to understand that the meaning of the "Xiong'an Millennium Plan" is that it shoulders the important mission of optimizing the spatial layout of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban belt, and it itself has the role of an innovation test field, which requires the blessing of artificial intelligence. And in many people Among the expectations, taking into account the advantages of China's AI industry in technological innovation, data reserves, and policy support, Xiongan may become the first city in the world to be fully empowered by AI in the future - and unlike the electric power revolution, the benefits are Relying on the efforts of others, the empowerment of cities by artificial intelligence is entirely led by China itself.

This means that in Xiongan, a new continent that is in urgent need of exploration, technology companies can play a role that goes far beyond the commercial scope. On November 8 and 23, Alibaba and Tencent signed strategic agreements with Xiongan New Area respectively; on December 20, Baidu also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Xiongan New Area, hoping to build this place into a benchmark for global smart cities. On the day of the signing, the strongest lineup in the history of the Apollo platform’s self-driving fleet (including passenger cars, commercial buses, logistics vehicles, sweepers, etc.) was unveiled and started collectively in Xiongan; on the same day, Apollo’s first council was also here held.

In fact, as early as the previous Wuzhen Internet Conference, Robin Li said that Baidu and Xiongan will jointly build a huge smart city plan: within the planned area, Xiongan New City will use artificial intelligence technology to solve traffic congestion, autonomous driving, identity recognition and empowerment, as well as issues such as green economic development and public efficiency improvements.

It now seems that on the "blank paper" of Xiongan, AI can draw far more blueprints than people imagined.

So, how will AI empower a city?

How autonomous driving will transform cities

A general answer is: it will significantly improve the operational efficiency of city resources.

The development of human science and technology to this day is a process of constantly "returning" power to individuals. The emergence of the Internet has triggered waves of "decentralization", and AI is bound to further decentralize urban resource allocation.

As you can see, whether it is food rationing or information dissemination, there are fewer and fewer top-down supply systems in the industrial era, and the aggregation method of the entire city's resources is increasingly turning to each specific person - and the consensus of global city managers is , in a city, the public resource that needs to be matched most efficiently is the transportation system. This matching is far from being as simple as "sharing travel to alleviate traffic congestion", but refers to the entire street system of the future city, which will bring increased value to everyone through decentralized intelligent scheduling.

In large part, this is because autonomous vehicles will become a core element of human transportation systems in the future. "Wired" magazine once interviewed a group of urban scholars about their views on autonomous driving. Some of the answers were cliché. Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Urban Lab, gave a representative answer: "A large amount of urban land is currently occupied by parking lots. and highways, they will be transformed into buildings with new functions, such as parks, public places and production spaces.”

The most enlightening answer comes from the well-known scholar Rainwater. In his view, when autonomous driving becomes popular, the boundaries between highways, sidewalks and street walls in cities will become blurred. Autonomous driving will break the shackles of urban planning in the industrial era, re-release the autonomy of urban residents, and "return" roads to individuals.

Just recently, the National Association of Urban Transportation Officials in the United States published a report on the future driverless city blueprint, detailing how smart transportation will be integrated into the urban environment. The core keyword of the report is: people-oriented.

This report puts forward several guidelines for future smart travel cities, such as: future cities will reduce the need for roads and ensure the safety and comfort of passers-by by improving automation efficiency; use third-party data platforms to exchange data securely and seamlessly; All street data supports street management in real time, maintaining a dynamic visual inventory of sidewalks to democratize sidewalks; carrying the most passengers with the fewest autonomous vehicles.

In their vision of an automated city, fewer lanes and frequent "intermediate crossing points (every 50-100 feet)" will greatly relieve the pressure on traffic intersections and even allow pedestrians to cross frequently and safely. Cross the road. In short, as Rainwater said: "With driverless cars, you may no longer need traffic lights or clear distinctions between sidewalks and roads. Cities will rely more on data. You can see the urban structure in a way that is difficult to The way we imagine things changes, especially in densely populated cities.”

Xiongan’s transportation ambitions

In fact, this coincides with the plan of Xiongan New Area.

Chen Gang, Secretary of the Party Working Committee and Director of the Management Committee of Xiongan New District, once said that in the future, Xiongan New District will realize a travel mode based on smart public transportation and supplemented by personalized travel by driverless private cars. This will form the future of Xiongan New District. The road network structure and space allocation pattern. A core concept of the planning and construction of Xiongan New Area is to return the city to people, no longer designing cities and roads according to the scale of cars, but designing according to the scale of people.

This requires the entire autonomous driving industry chain to be on standby. Previously, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced that it would rely on Baidu to establish a national artificial intelligence open innovation platform for autonomous driving, and the Apollo open platform has become an out-and-out "national team." As mentioned before, on the day when the strategic cooperation agreement was signed with Xiongan, Apollo’s first council was also held in Xiongan. According to reports, Baidu, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Ford, Nvidia, Chery, BAIC, FAW, A total of 10 King Long bus companies have become members of the Apollo Council (the entire Apollo ecological partner scale has exceeded 70). They will jointly discuss the development of urban autonomous vehicles, promote the formulation of relevant regulations and policies, and explore autonomous driving that can be replicated and promoted. Demonstration mode. The collective launch of the Apollo unmanned vehicle fleet in Xiongan has also accumulated technology and experience for the operation of unmanned vehicles in Xiongan.

Xiongan has not hidden its ambition: to become the first city in China with no traffic lights, no congestion, an advanced intelligent traffic management system, and no longer need a large number of manpower for road management.

In fact, if the above ambitions are realized, it will not only benefit Xiongan, but also the entire Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Economic Belt and even cities across the country.

Today, about 50% of the world's population live in cities. According to the United Nations, the global population is expected to reach 9 billion in 2050, and the urbanization rate is expected to reach 70%. Along with urbanization, there are also traffic congestion, rising housing prices, environmental pollution, etc. Various "big city diseases".

In the face of "big city disease", the establishment of Xiongan New Area is an ambitious "Chinese plan", shifting from concentrating resources to develop super cities in the past to developing urban agglomerations. The purpose of this is to promote urbanization while striving for a relatively balanced urban population distribution to avoid excessive population concentration in a few large cities.

In this process, the power of technology will be very critical. Reid Ewing, director of the Urban Research Center at the University of Utah, compared autonomous driving to the construction of highways back then. Just like the development of highways made it possible to "evenly expand urban boundaries." In Ewing's view: "Imagine a future with very little road congestion. If it happens, you can use your time productively in driverless cars, and the 'generalized cost' of people traveling will be greatly reduced."

This may mean that autonomous driving can allow different cities to get rid of their strong dependence on local transportation and allow the real core resource of this era, talent, to flow more freely. This will not only relieve the pressure on super metropolises, but also improve the quality of urban transportation to a certain extent. By pulling up areas with inconvenient transportation and relatively scarce resources, the problem of uneven regional development will be improved.

What the city of the future will look like

Of course, the empowerment of cities by artificial intelligence is not limited to transportation, but penetrates into all aspects of public life. Due to space limitations, today I will briefly describe the impact of speech recognition and face recognition technology on the future of cities.

Let’s talk about the former first. The history of human-computer interaction is a process of gradually saying goodbye to redundancy and the difficulty of interaction continues to decrease. The consensus in the industry is that in the next five to ten years, with the rise of the Internet of Things industry, voice will become the most natural way for humans and machines to interact. interactive mode. For example, Baidu's conversational AI operating system DuerOS allows people to use the most natural language to operate more than 200 functions such as information query, life services, smart homes, travel conditions, personal assistants and knowledge education - perhaps in the future, An, people can use the most straightforward language to complete daily activities such as payment, inquiry, shopping, and taxi hailing by talking to the device.

Of course, the premise is that the machine knows you - which brings us to another artificial intelligence technology that benefits cities: facial recognition. As the core technology of image recognition, face recognition can realize face detection, face comparison and face search. Baidu has implemented facial recognition in scenic spots such as Wuzhen and Wuyishan a long time ago. It uses facial recognition turnstiles to improve the park experience and management efficiency. It has also cooperated with a family-finding platform to help family members quickly find their loved ones through facial recognition system comparison. Rescue information for lost people.

It is conceivable that machines with AI capabilities such as voice interaction and face recognition will make people's urban life more convenient and comfortable. The most direct portrayal is: when people are already troubled by various passwords, Xiongan in the future may It will become a city without all kinds of identity authentication and without all kinds of cumbersome procedures. I particularly believe that just as the "cashless society" has become rapidly popular in China (and is envied by other countries), the more technological "passwordless society" will also come first in China, and it is likely to be in the country. install.

And you know, what makes China the envy of many foreign tourists is not only "going out without a wallet" but also "dare to go out at night" - in the future, artificial intelligence technology will also penetrate into the urban security system to further improve social safety.

In fact, technological advances have a history of reducing crime rates. For example, the crime problem in New York in the 1980s was very serious, but in the 1990s, the crime rate in New York suddenly dropped all the way, even lower than the average crime rate in the United States - because humans invented the webcam at this time, and New York was the first to start large-scale The installation of cameras has greatly improved the detection rate and also reduced the crime rate. Therefore, it is completely conceivable that when facial recognition technology is perfected, it will be tantamount to building a "digital skynet" in the city, which will greatly improve the ability to identify and warn against terrorism and make the city safer.

In short, in people's common expectations, Xiongan, which has been at the forefront of global urban exploration, is expected to become the first artificial intelligence city in global history.

Of course, artificial intelligence is related to Xiongan and all cities. I believe that just like when the electric power revolution sparked a prairie fire in China, what Xiongan will become is what all cities can become.