Industry 5.0 and Healthcare 5.0 converge towards a human centered society, having technological advancement as a lever. In Society 5.0, decentralized autonomous cities and a convergence of physical and cyberspace are the foundations of the new chapter of society’s development. The idea of creating digital replicas and legitimate representatives of human beings in cyberspace has become a pillar of digitalization. Society 5.0 introduces Human Digital Twins as a central element of Cyber Physical Systems that include human factors or are designed to interact with humans in a personalized fashion. Overall, the HDT and neighboring concepts are applied to depict how humans can be represented in a cyberspace. However, there are clear challenges in determining which human characteristics should take precedence, how much autonomy should be granted to HDTs to optimize their functionality and how to conceptualize the digital environment in which HDTs interact with various entities, including other digital agents and stakeholders with agency and decisional power. To harness similarities and differences of current approaches, we propose a classification of HDTs based on meta-characteristics and ethical implications. We discuss ethical implication by focusing on emerging risks and paradigm shifts and anchor the previous discussion in the vision for Society 5.0, questioning whether societal development relying on disruptive technologies, instead of leading to more human-centered societies might be driving humanized societies away from humanity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a disruptive technology promising to revolutionize the relationship between humans and urban environments. While the forms of human-machine interaction are becoming increasingly natural and naturalized, the impacts of such interactions for individuals and society are far from simple to grasp. As AI and Urban AI-related systems are being adopted by local governments and public authorities in support of public service delivery, it becomes increasingly important to involve communities in discussing impacts and working towards acceptable trade-offs in terms of the risks and benefits AI can represent to everyday life. Participation is often part of the discourse around policymaking and urban governance, yet the gap between decision-makers and city-makers within urban governance is not resolved. Besides, the barriers participatory processes hold to be accessible and inclusive stem now from lack of AI literacy and overall awareness on why and how participation can be a pillar of policymaking. We propose an urban governance framework for assessing the collective challenges of AI focused on people centeredness and public participation. Our contribution to the field of urban governance is a piloted framework designed and implemented in collaboration with city representatives, supra governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations and respective lessons learned.

Although urban digital twins are still at an embryonic stage of development, their use cases are multiple, ranging from big data aggregation to simulations. Additionally, predictions can be rendered and quickly implemented using actuators to transform physical environments and influence urban life. In this article, we investigate the potential of an agent-based model in a smart city setting to predict emergent behavior in relation to the suppression of civil violence by implementing crowd management practices. To this end, we designed a simulation environment that includes cameras in public spaces and wearable sensors, and considers nudging and self-nudging processes supported by a surveillance apparatus. Building on Epstein’s threshold-based model of civil violence, the proposed simulation is informed by surveillance theories and contemplates methods for crowd monitoring and social control. The experiments’ results provide insights into how specific measures and combined actions may influence the suppression of civil violence in public spaces and can be useful to inform crowd management activities and policymaking. Moreover, we use the simulation to reflect upon the potentials and limitations of integrating agent-based models into urban digital twins and emphasize the imminent risks for individuals and democratic societies of employing a ubiquitous surveillance apparatus endowed with the autonomy to trigger actuators.

Portraying Urban Change in Alfama (Lisbon): How Local Socio-Spatial Practices Shape Heritage | Article | Urban Planning