Abstract
Intelligent environments and intelligent government are tied together. Successful state operations supply the research, planning, legislation, coordination, and implementation necessary for intelligent environments, while intelligent environments can support government by reducing different risks posed by climate change. Making government more intelligent is difficult, however, reflecting the universality of the “uncertainty principle,” or unwanted unpredictability at the individual, organizational, political, cultural, environmental, and technical levels that complicate human efforts at social intervention. Yet, failure is not certain. By reflecting on two successful case studies of digital government—digital democracy in the former Soviet republic of Estonia and departments of motor vehicles in the United States—this chapter seeks to identify lessons for supporting intelligent environments more broadly. The chapter argues that successful governmental innovations often involve sharing the work of digitization across public and private agencies, bringing the subjects of technological innovation into the fold through financial or temporal incentives, managing modernizing projects through a distanced approach built on broad principles, and embracing technologies that are multifunctional, interoperable, and distributed. Finally, the hope for intelligent environments lies in hope itself, in embracing humanity's capacity for action at a time when the fate of the world seems so dark.
Published Version
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