The Polyopticon: a diagram for urban artificial intelligences

Abstract Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized Michel Foucault, as model for understanding social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on negative ramifications Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, data consolidation with development, positioning technologies themselves driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, autonomy in city. paper describes an alternative diagram AI—the Polyopticon: distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution change political, social, psychodynamic relationships sentience witness city, shifting effects watching watched beyond exclusive domain top-down surveillance discipline. The Polyopticon poses more expansive ambivalent spectrum possibilities scenarios, one undermines totalizing, singular, cerebral notion intelligence so characterizes smart critiques.