''“We don’t have to employ more traffic police; the smart machine will do the job!” proclaimed U Ye Myat Thu of the Mandalay City Development Committee (MCDC) to an audience of three dozen ministers, mayors, and officials from across Myanmar crammed into a small traffic control room in Mandalay. Myanmar’s second-largest municipality has installed remote-control traffic lights, high definition video cameras, road sensors, and loudspeakers at intersections throughout the city, he explained. Software in the control room takes that data and generates dynamic traffic-flow visualizations for a handful of trained officials overseeing the system. he new technology, the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System (SCATS), uses artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize traffic flows across the city. Learning and improving over time, it can answer questions such as, “To maximize traffic flows, how long should the green light stay on during rush hour?” The system runs daily experiments and makes continual, small adjustments without the need for a human operator. SCATS has already increased traffic flows over one of Mandalay’s main bridges by a reported 50 percent...''