Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Cities, Initial Thoughts.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Cities: Initial Thoughts.
In an earlier post (January 14th) before the recent U.S. Presidential Inauguration I argued that the new Trump Administration’s theatrics about deporting millions of undocumented residents from the U.S. would be part of an effort to distract the public’s attention from the coming disruptions in our labor markets that will be driven by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This so-called “gaslighting” strategy would be the most recent chapter in the standard American political playbook of preventing public pushback against the introduction of major technological innovations by making other (often unrelated) problems seem more compelling.
Both major political parties have used this strategy over the years. The most cited justification has always been that both American national security and American economic dominance rest on rapid technological innovation. Consequently, it’s only a venial political sin to distract attention away from problems created by new technologies to help prevent pushback against their widespread dissemination.
Yet many AI experts have been warning about the scale of disruption that widespread advances in AI will bring. Perhaps the most profound arguments for thoughtful caution are discussed in a remarkable book published in 2024. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human[i] was co-authored by the late Henry Kissinger and two prominent technologists: Craig Mundie, formerly the chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO and Chairman of Google.
Kissinger, Mundie, and Schmidt clearly argue for continued development of AI. Yet they caution against gaslighting the challenges we will face.
“Neither blind faith nor unjustified fear can form the basis of an effective strategy; one needs self-doubt to have knowledge but self-confidence to act. We must try to understand the challenges that AI will present even as we lack the prior exposure or the essential experience to guarantee the accuracy of our comprehension. And even as we navigate this daunting task, we must also, to avoid a passive future, surmount the many difficulties already facing our species.
While some may view this moment as humanity’s final act, we perceive instead a new beginning. The cycle of creation – technological, biological, sociological, political – is entering a new phase. That phase may operate under new paradigms, among other things, logic, faith, and time. With sober optimism, may we meet its genesis.”
Despite calls like this for forward-thinking caution, the recent Inauguration and the events of the last few weeks strongly suggest that the Trump Administration will pursue a less cautionary path. The image of technology titans lined up 10 feet behind Donald Trump in the Capitol Rotunda as he took the oath of office conveyed the message “full speed ahead.”
The even more stunning release of the open-source large language model known as R1 by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek underscores the fact that the AI revolution is accelerating. R1 was produced at 6% of the cost of building OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and it uses only one-tenth of that model’s computing power.
OpenAI is now complaining that DeepSeek’s success comes partly from unlicensed use of OpenAI’s innovations. But those complaints won’t slow down the speed of dissemination. The AI horses, so to speak, are already out of the barn and running free. The stampede is already underway.
Now is the time to begin thinking about how the rapidly emerging partnership between humans and AI will change our world and alter our experience of life. The rest of this post identifies two initial questions I ask about how AI might affect cities, each followed by my initial thoughts. We all need to consider these issues, so my goal is to foster your own thinking. Future posts will explore additional questions. These are just the beginning.
There is an old saying that half the challenge of solving a problem is to ask the right questions. So, I hope these questions are a worthwhile start.
1. Will Artificial Intelligence Reduce Our Need for Cities?
Let’s put the emergence of AI in some historical perspective. Cities are still relatively new habitats for humans. Modern humans are homo sapien sapiens. As a species we are about 300,000 years old. For most of that time we shared the Earth with other human species as well as many closely related species, all of which are part of the larger category of primates.
One factor that all primates have had in common for millions of years is that primates live a lifeway in small nomadic bands that sustain themselves by hunting prey and gathering edible plants. Primates rely on brains more than brawn for safety. Our brains allow us to collaborate to create and implement clever strategies for our own survival. Constant movement was a key to those clever strategies.
Movement from place to place is a primate characteristic that all humans experienced for the first 290,000 years of our species. The very first humans ever to evolve a settled lifeway by living in small permanent settlements lived only 10,000 years ago. Our best estimates for when most humans lived settled lives rather than nomadic lives range from 3,000 years ago to only 1,500 years ago. Our primate preference for hunting and gathering took thousands of years to go away. Indeed, some nomadic cultures are still present, although their numbers are falling fast.
The world today is focused on settled lifeways. Just ten years ago humanity pushed past the threshold of having more than half of our population living in big cities. Small town and rural settlements no longer dominate. With 8.2 billion people living on the planet today, it seems impossible that any new technology could push people back to hunting and gathering. AI may spark changes in how we live settled lives, but cities are here to stay.
2. Will Artificial Intelligence Change the Form of Our Cities?
The oldest cities we know about date back almost to the beginning of settled life. To quote the great architectural historian Spiro Kostof, the form of any city is a “receptacle of meaning.”[ii] All human behaviors convey some form of meaning, and cities are perhaps our most meaningful creations.
Every city evolves its own form influenced by its local topography, the building materials that are available, the type of local climate from which its residents need to be sheltered, the level its builders’ engineering knowledge, and other factors.
Yet cities evolve their own aesthetics because people use those local factors to express the most cherished components of their own culture. Ancient cities with singular cultures created cities to reflect their cultural priorities. Theocracies built cities to honor their gods. Monarchies built cities to honor their royals, and authoritarian cultures honored their warriors. Multi-cultural cities evolved different forms to blend different cultural priorities into a unified form.
Most cities today evolve according to an aesthetic that can be called industrial. Modern cities are designed in ways that honor and enable core components of industrial social relations. The most fundamental part of industrial social relations is that most people earn their survival by working someplace different from where they live, and by receiving a cash wage for their work. Their cash wages are then used to purchase their own housing, food, clothing, transportation, health care, entertainment, and other necessities.
Different classes of workers do different types of work. The broadest distinction is between those who perform manual work and those who perform mental work. Manual workers tend to be paid less. They live in less expensive neighborhoods. Mental workers are paid more, and they live in more expensive neighborhoods with higher amenities.
Higher status mental work is usually located in more expensive work settings. High-rise signature Downtown office buildings are the most iconic example. Manual work is given less honor by being performed in more austere settings. Transportation systems that connect the residential locations of different categories of workers to different types of workspaces typically convey the same type of social hierarchy.
These general patterns are, of course, much more complex in the messy, evolved form of most cities. Yet the underlying principles of industrial social relations can be seen clearly through the multiple ways that people adapt these principles to the historical form of each contemporary city, big or small.
If AI changes the form of cities, it will do so, in my opinion, by making major changes in the underlying structure of industrial social relations. This seems very likely.
Automation and globalization have already caused major disruptions to the role that manual work plays in the life of older industrialized cultures in the developed areas of the world. These changes have seriously eroded the lifestyles, the financial security, and the social acceptance of industrial social relations among hundreds of millions of manual workers in these older industrial cities. At the same time, these changes have created new opportunities and a new era of upward mobility, and subsequent acceptance for industrial social relations, among hundreds of millions of manual workers in new, fast-growing industrial cities.
Older industrial cities have “hollowed out.” New industrial cities have become megacities. Offices have decentralized to sprawling suburbs in new and old industrial cities, and new communications technologies are facilitating a worldwide explosion in working-from-home.
AI will likely bring the same scale and scope of disruption to the lifeway of mental workers in both older and new industrial cities. AI’s algorithms already outperform most people in many complex mental tasks. This will have profound consequences for the lifestyles and financial stability for hundreds of millions (billions?) of wage & salary earners across the world who thought that their mental skills would shield them from the negative consequences of automation and globalization.
In addition, if AI is freed from its current existence inside computer algorithms and is allowed to migrate into the sphere of robotics, that would empower AI to interact kinetically in the real world. The result would be a second and more powerful wave of profound disruption in the role that manual work plays in industrial social relations. The second wave would no longer be contained to older industrial cities. It would also wash over the full range of the world’s fast-growing global megacities.
Summary
It seems clear that we are on the brink of a rapidly accelerating era of Artificial Intelligence innovation and widespread dissemination. The historian of science and journalist, Walter Isaacson, among others, have already named this the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
This new age is likely to have deep consequences for the future of our cities. Cities are built by people as expressions of their own culture. In our modern world, the culture expressed by most cities is dominated by the principles of industrial social relations.
Yet the AI revolution that has just begun will likely cause rapid and profound changes to the core principles of industrial social relations that have been used to shape the form of most cities. It could even bring an end to the historical period in which our cities evolve around the principles of industrial social relations. But if that happens, what new type of culture would influence the form of our cities? More discussion of this will be in future posts. One thing seems clear to me though. AI may change our cities, but it won’t make them irrelevant. Cities are here to stay.
Bob Gleeson
[i] (New York, Little Brown & Company, 2024).
[ii]Sprio Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meaning Through History (New York, Bulfinch Press, 1993), p. 9.