Dr James Cuffe, University College Cork, Making reality ‘smarter’

This talk draws upon research from an Irish Research Council funded 3 year project examining experiences of digital urban transitioning in Cork City. The two ambitions from the research are to provide best practice guidance for Cork City Council in various ongoing initiatives such as development of city digital services, and to theoretically reappraise social relations with, and to, new technologies. During our research, questions of artificiality, veracity, realness and fakeness, authenticity and inauthenticity arose. This paper explores the usefulness – or lack thereof – of these terms in understanding the impact of new technologies on our augmented lives with reference to popular 'smart' initiatives being undertaken globally.

Ongoing well-funded and large-scale trials include for example- city digital twins as real time city simulations promising to make cities smarter by modelling problems from traffic management to climate change, or digital twin bodies as virtual patients to make smarter diagnoses and improved life outcomes. Such digital twinning raises questions around ideal types, ideology and bias underpinned by notions of how the world really is, a subject matter ripe for anthropological investigation.