Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities integrate a wide variety of technologies and support those innovations capable of delivering sustainable socio-economic development of cities. They are complex environments that are shaped by their innovation capacity, information and communication technologies (ICTs) development and adoption, living standards, residents’ readiness, and, last but not least, the willingness to invest. Higher urbanization rates and “mega-cities” with 10 million inhabitants or more make difficult to create a sustainable and cost-effective environment and a high quality of life for the citizens. To overcome this shortcoming, the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are needed to increase ICTs solutions and implicitly, to augment the cities competitiveness. Our paper objective is to analyse the public attitude regarding the influence of AI on smart cities characteristics and to identify if there are significant differences in their perspective by gender and by age group. The statistical data analysis was performed using two-way measure analysis of variance (ANOVA). The differences between groups were analysed using inferential statistics. This paper contributes to the understanding of the importance of AI techniques in improving urban living.