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AIPROPX ReportFortune · 2h ago
Goldman Sachs Global Institute co-head: remaking our world for machine intelligence
The emergence of new technology has long inspired humans to shape our environments. The invention of steel permitted the rise of skyscrapers, the automobile inspired highway systems and the internet gave rise to a whole new set of digital spaces.
Now, a new force for change is upon us. The pace of improvement in AI models has led many observers to predict that human intelligence may soon be overtaken by the cognitive capacity of machines. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei imagines a world with “a country of geniuses in a data center.” Elon Musk posited this summer that “AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. There really won’t be anything that AI can’t do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps.”
In such a world, it seems likely that the digital and physical affordances we have constructed for the benefit of humans will be superseded by or at least complemented by infrastructure that is specifically designed for ready and effective use by “bots,” both digital and physical.
Today, our world is designed for human cognition, cadence and trust. Now imagine a world built for machine intelligence, wire speeds and code-based contracts. Humans may no longer be the primary actors in this new theater of our own making.
Bending and Breaking Physical Spaces
AI agents may transform the physical world. It seems superfluous to say that our homes, offices, stores, and public spaces are designed for humans. Think of the centuries of architectural design dedicated to making those spaces useful, accommodating, safe, and efficient. Never mind the time and creativity devoted to making them aesthetically pleasing. But as robots begin to populate our society and workplaces, these locations will need to be accessible and effective for humans and robots alike. Both will need architecture and design for human-machine cooperation.
Building new physical structures is often a slow and expensive process. But humans have rebuilt our physical world to accommodate new technologies in the past, with changes in transportation offering perhaps the clearest examples. Ancient Greek roads had wheel ruts to guide carts over steep or slippery terrain. Railroads necessitated new logistical hubs and services around rail terminals. This had downstream effects, changing the value of land, expanding the potential to commute long distances to cities, and creating physical dividing lines between neighborhoods.
In the 20th century, the rise of mass-produced automobiles led to multilane highways, the construction of new parking facilities, and the rise of the suburbs. In our own time, how might autonomous vehicles reshape the physical environment? Autonomous vehicles do not have the same requirements as traditional cars with human drivers. A human driver requires parking near the driver’s end destination. An autonomous vehicle could drop off a passenger and move on to its next task. Alternatively, it could queue elsewhere, waiting for pickup time. Today, roughly 22% of land in cities with over 1 million inhabitants is used for parking. The rise of autonomous vehicles could reduce that figure, opening land to other uses. Merge lanes could be smaller, given that AVs often operate with tighter tolerances for risk than human drivers. Roads could also be narrower, with expanded room for sidewalks or bike lanes. Furthermore, without the need for steering wheels or pedals, the physical shape of cars may change, opening the possibility for new forms for the cars of the future.
Such changes won’t happen overnight, but our physical world is already being rebuilt to accommodate AI-enabled technologies. In Dallas, Texas, efforts are underway to prepare for the advent of Zipline’s drone-based delivery service. Born from a successful effort to speed the delivery of blood plasma to remote hospitals in Rwanda, Zipline has evolved to serve consumers with fixed-wing drone deliveries of everything from Starbucks to DoorDash . One of Zipline’s primary partners in the region is Walmart , which is beginning to adapt its store design to drive more convenience and efficiency in staging deliveries by drone.
Workers at one such facility recently began cutting openings into the walls of a Walmart Supercenter — not for a renovation, but for delivery drones, letting employees load packages directly from the sales floor into the sky, bypassing the free-standing charging posts the companies used at first. It’s a small, literal crack in a retail architecture built for nearly a century around one assumption: that the customer walking through the front door is human.
The impact of such efforts could soon spread far beyond individual facilities. In August Zipline announced a partnership with Uber to accelerate the use of drones in deliveries. Noting the potential effect of such parentships beyond how quickly customers could now get their next order, Zipline co-founder Keller Cliffton stated , “Every great transportation revolution has changed where people live, how businesses operate, and how economies grow.”
Ultimately, supply stations for Zipline may become purpose-built for these kinds of workflows. New apartment buildings may be designed with convenient landing spots for the drones to drop their payloads on rooftops or courtyards.
While many efforts exist to build humanoid robots that share our form and therefore can operate reliably in our environments, it is likely that such machines will be outnumbered by robots that abandon the human form in favor of utilitarian shapes designed for efficiency. As former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick observed in the public unveiling of his new “Atoms” platform, a specialized robot that looks nothing like a human chef could optimally tackle the task of “making 1,000 pancakes an hour,” while a humanoid, not optimized for that function, would struggle to complete this enormo...
Goldman Sachs Global InstituteNowAnthropic CEO Dario AmodeiElon MuskThereTodayHumansThinkNeverBothBuildingAncient Greek
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