With half the world's population living in cities, and the prospect of six and a half billion city-dwellers by 2050, the authorities have got to find ways of controlling urbanites' behaviour.
The way to do it, according to IBM's Vice President for Innovation, Bernie Meyerson, is the integration of real-world data with analytics developed by stream computing.
"That allows you to be proactive rather than reactive", Meyerson told last week's Globalpress Summit Conference in
Meyerson and IBM have been spending time predicting traffic flows in
"We've been analysing traffic patterns to predict traffic flow ahead of time and our forecasts have shown predictions which were astonishingly close to reality," he said.
This is all made possible by what Meyerson calls 'The Internet of Things' - devices like cameras, sensors etc, all connected up to the Internet, which can collect massive amounts of data which can then be analysed by stream computing to produce useful findings.
"We must develop and deploy systems of systems able to recognise and resolve the ambiguities resulting from the heterogeneous nature of modern infrastructure", said Meyerson.
All a bit above my head, I'm afraid.
Oh, so we are about to be uhh, scheduled... optimally? I wonder how many things will have to banned, with instant fines, for this to work?
I agree Scunnerous it's an horrendous vision. Trust Stockholm and Singapore to be pioneering it