Toward a Smart City Using Tentacular AI

The European Initiative on Smart Cities [2] is an effort by the European Commission [4] to improve quality of life throughout Europe, while progressing toward energy and climate objectives. Many of its goals are relevant to and desirable in the world at large. We propose that it is essential that artificial agents in a Smart City have theories of the minds of its inhabitants. We describe a scenario in which such theories are indispensable, and cannot be adequately and usefully captured by current forms of ambient intelligence. Then, we show how a new form of distributed, multi-agent artificial intelligence, Tentacular AI, which among other things entails a capacity for reasoning and planning based in highly expressive cognitive calculi (logics), is able to intelligently address this situation.