Borot Proquette

For many years I worked on the side that designs systems. After working as a systems engineer and a management consultant, I oversaw a city's digital transformation and its smart-city programme.

When I was a boy in Japan, playing on the Famicom and tinkering with BASIC, even meeting someone from abroad was rare. I dreamed of connecting with people overseas and talking with them about all kinds of things. Then the internet arrived, and now I can reach people anywhere in the world with ease. I can buy almost anything without leaving home. What digital technology has given us is immense. And yet the shape of everyday life in the city has not changed all that much. Even what we have been calling the smart city is an extension of what you could already imagine from the Japan of my childhood. It was life, lived in the raw. People took the absurdities of the world in their stride, found grey zones in how the rules could be read, eased friction with their wits, and worked things out with the rules, the buildings and their neighbours. In an imperfect world full of bugs, people had no choice but to keep sensing and thinking.

With the arrival of AI, this is about to change. Near-perfect answers now arrive without passing through human thought. Cities, too, will be fitted with ever more perfect rules and systems. Accidents will fall; getting around will become easy. Above all, people will no longer have to think about any of it. Whether that leads somewhere good or somewhere bad, no one knows. But this much can be said: we are standing at a fork.

So I photograph the present: people living in imperfect cities with their senses and their wits. I photograph it through the eyes of someone who helped build the smart city.