This morning something strange happened — the kind of thing that makes you think.
Same commute as always: car from Legnano to Viale Majno in Milan. Thirty-one kilometres that normally eat up an hour and fifteen minutes. Today: 35 minutes. Average speed 53 km/h. I wasn’t driving fast.
Anyone who does this route daily knows that’s basically science fiction, unless it’s a Sunday in August. Even by train, when everything miraculously aligns — Trenord on time, walking legs included — you’re still looking at around an hour.
This morning felt like I was still asleep and dreaming.
Not a single red light. Not a metre of queue. I barely stopped once.
I just went from point A to point B in the time it took to get through seven songs on Spotify.
And that’s when something clicked. Just yesterday I’d heard Massimiliano Sighinolfi mention an interesting experiment: in Hangzhou, there’s a system called City Brain, developed by Alibaba Cloud.
It’s a platform that uses AI, urban data, and sensors to coordinate a city in real time: traffic lights that adapt to flow, congestion redistributed dynamically, ambulances given automatic priority clearance. A city historically notorious for gridlock, engineered to actually move.
The price of that optimisation? To make a city like that work, you need movement data. Cameras. Sensors. Traffic flows. Vehicle GPS.
Here’s the paradox: most of this infrastructure already exists in our cities. Cameras are everywhere. Our sat-navs already know where the traffic is. But that data is largely siloed and used reactively — fines, checks, statistics. Not to actually make the city function better.
So, given that this is already the status quo — given that we’ve already surrendered, in practice, any meaningful privacy over our movements — why aren’t we using that data to make our cities work?
Which brings me to the question I’m putting to you: if we could have cities where
- traffic actually flows
- ambulances arrive minutes earlier
- accidents decrease
- daily stress drops
would you accept a city managed by a centralised AI system that knows where you are?
Or do you prefer a city that watches you anyway, keeps you stuck in traffic, and just sends you fines?
How much GDP would we recover by cutting congestion this way? How much less CO₂ would we emit?
And above all — would we feel more surveilled? Or simply more free to move?
Let me know in the comments.