How smart can our smart cities be?

What if communication and community have declined because we are not using our hands as much? And if they are all in decline, how smart can our smart cities be?

In our societies, there is a creeping sense we are communicating less, and connecting less as a community. This has mirrored a decline in the use of our hands, at home and at work. We cook less, build less, and repair less. Instead we eat out, buy ready-made, and throw away (and buy again).

It may be a pure coincidence they are all happening at the same time.

Or maybe not.

Here’s why.

The clue lies in what a million-year old handaxe at the British Museum has taught us about us.

Found in Tanzania’s Odulvai Gorge, this Odulvai Handaxe does not look like the axes most of us have seen. It looks more like a tear drop, but with elongated edges that are sharp and cutting. The book A History of the World in 100 Objects calls it a “supreme hitech stone” -- it could drill, scrape, cut, and kill. It was the “Swiss Army knife of the Stone Age”. It was an awesome tool.

But what is most amazing is the Handaxe’s tear drop shape

mirrors that of our hands today. Hold up your hand and you can see in your mind’s eye, this early tool of modern man. Our hand as we know and have today has been making and using such high tech tools for over a million years.

To do so required imagination, dexterity, and learning. It also required a capacity for communication and community. When scientists scanned the brain of a modern stone tool maker (i.e. a stone knapper) while he was shaping such a handaxe, they found that “the areas of the modern brain activated... overlap considerably with those you use when you speak”.

This meant that “people could sit down to exchange ideas, plan their work together or even just to gossip.” It also meant that “[i]f you can make a decent handaxe like this one, it’s a good bet that you’re well on the way to something we would all recognise as society.”

In other words, the capability of our hands mirrored our capacity to deal with the complexity of communication and community.

That combination has given our hand potent qualities. So potent that even the most powerful robots and supercomputers cannot currently replicate. It is no coincidence that the world’s largest clothes manufacturer by volume, Hong Kong’s Crystal Group, announced last year that for now, they would be “betting on human workers rather than automation”. Their reason? According to their chief executive, because the “handling of soft materials is really hard for robots”.

Or that in Japan, the packing of large numbers of lunch bento boxes for konbinis remains a human task. Yaskawa Electric, a leader in industrial robots, points out they are “wrestling with ... the convenience store lunch”. They find the odd-shaped tofu and vegetable “extremely hard to grasp”. Literally and technologically.

Our hand clearly has the upper hand. But yet, the reality is we are using our hands less and less. Could that have corroded our capacity for communication and community as well?

Signs of this abound. At work, colleagues email each other, instead of walking over to chat. At home, family members message each other even at the dinner table. And we hear of couples having text relationships and breakups.

People are also increasingly staying within their bubbles and echo chambers. And digging in. Recent research on social media conducted at Duke University found that when echo chambers are exposed to opposing views, they become even more entrenched in their own views. Their bubbles became more disconnected.

Not surprising then that societies are splintering. The sense of community that once held everyone together, that we might all be different but we are in the same proverbial boat, is fraying. It risks splintering into every man and woman for him and herself. Competing with -- even crushing -- each other, instead of connecting and communicating.

It could get worse with smart cities. Smart cities often center on digital innovations, the high tech tools of our time. Digital skills in areas such as artificial intelligence are in short supply. Cities are hence training workers and students in these digital skills, starting with coding and programming from young.

Conspicuously missing in all of this is the hand. In learning coding, programming, and other digital skills, the hand is largely limited to the tappity-tap of the keyboard and the click-click of a mouse. The hand thus seems to have very little hand in the smart city. Hence as we pour investments into smart cities, might we in fact be undermining our communications and communities? If so, it would have chilling social consequences.

We need to bring the hand back into the smart city. Anyone who uses their hands for pleasure or profession will tell you just how amazing the hand is. There is texture that only the hand can feel and create. There is deftness that only the hand can wield. And there is the warmth of the hand, equally important in making sushi as it is in comforting someone sad. The hand gives life, and is life itself.

When we use more of our hands, we would be drawing on over a million years of cultural and biological evolution. Not just of our hands, but also of our capacity to connect and communicate. At a time when we need to join hands to tackle pressing societal challenges, we should start nurturing the hand again. Beyond craft, mastery, and the sheer pleasure of making, the hand holds the promise of a higher purpose. Like what the brain scan of the stone knapper suggests, the hand might hold the key to unlocking the complexities of communication and community. With our hands, we could communicate better and build better communities.

Smart cities who can do so will have the upper hand.