Navigation Services and Urban Sustainability

The The rise of socio-technical systems in which humans interact with various forms of Artificial Intelligence, including assistants and recommenders, multiplies the possibility for the emergence of large-scale social behavior, possibly with unintended negative consequences. In this work, we discuss a particularly interesting case, i.e., navigation services' impact on urban emissions, showing through simulations that the sum of many individually "optimal" choices may have unintended negative outcomes because such choices influence and interfere with each other on top of shared resources. To prove this point, we demonstrate how the introduction of a random component in the path suggestion phase may help to relieve the effect of collective and individual choices on the urban environment in terms of urban emissions.