5. The Responsible City: Avoiding Technology’s Undemocratic Social Contracts

Throughout the book, we have explored how technology's social impacts are influenced by far more than simply its capabilities: social and political conditions constrain the outcomes that technology can generate, people can wield similar technologies to achieve distinct outcomes, and machine learning models derive insights from data that reflects a legacy of bias and discrimination. By overlooking these factors, tech goggles encourage the adoption of smart city technologies that generate unintended and undesirable social consequences.