Are we at the dawn of the AI-created city? - Raconteur

Just over a century since The Manifesto of Futurist Architecture declared the city must be rethought and rebuilt like an "immense and tumultuous shipyard" – "everywhere dynamic", and the house like a "gigantic machine", it may be that author Antonio Sant'Elia had things the wrong way around. Because although his machine-fetishising sketches inspired our common vision of a science-fiction future – as in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, with its technological Tower of Babel an imposing centrepiece – it might be the gigantic machines that are making our houses. Architecture and AI visionaries – forming especially around MIT in the 1950s, through to the later work of MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte – and design pioneers have long thought about automating the creation of our environments. Now the technology is catching up to their ideas, and a radical shift into AI-assisted design is taking hold, with implications that could radically transform the form, feel and function of the places we inhabit. Completely automated design is not quite there yet. This crop of generative, AI-assisted tools is rather new.