KARACHI: The government should make serious efforts to make Karachi a better city through technology and artificial intelligence, said Pasban Democratic Party (PDP) Chairman Altaf Shakoor here on Sunday. He said the megacity was too large, too complex and too rapidly changing to be managed effectively through conventional methods alone. Modern technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offered the megacity an opportunity to improve three fundamental aspects of urban life: safety, mobility and civic services. He said the objective should not be technology for technology’s sake. The objective should be to use available technological tools to make Karachi a safer, better-connected, cleaner and more efficiently managed city. He said the major cities around the world had already demonstrated what was possible. London and New York had extensive networks of surveillance cameras used for public safety, traffic management and law enforcement. Major Chinese cities had gone even further in integrating cameras, sensors, digital platforms and AI into urban management. He said these cities differed greatly in their political systems, regulations and approaches to privacy, but they demonstrated a common principle: a large modern city could use technology to obtain a much better real-time understanding of what was happening in its public spaces. Karachi should learn from these experiences without attempting to copy any one city’s model, he said. It should select technologies that were appropriate to its own needs and circumstances, while ensuring that their use remained consistent with Pakistani law, citizens’ rights, privacy and appropriate oversight. Altaf Shakoor said the Safe City Project provided an important starting point. A modern network of cameras and associated technologies could substantially strengthen Karachi’s ability to combat crime, respond to emergencies and enforce traffic regulations. Real-time monitoring could help identify incidents more quickly, direct police and emergency resources to where they were needed, assist investigations