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- Delaney Sawyer via Fortune | FORTUNE
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- Business·5 min to read
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Goldman Sachs institute co-head: world must be rebuilt for machine intelligence
ReGoldman Sachs institute co-head: world must be rebuilt for machine intelligence
As AI models rapidly improve, the physical and digital world designed for humans will need to be rebuilt for machine intelligence, from narrower roads and less parking to drone-ready stores and buildings, according to a Goldman Sachs Global Institute co-head.
The physical and digital world is on the verge of a transformation as profound as the rise of skyscrapers, highways, and the internet, driven by the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. As AI models improve at an unprecedented pace, observers predict that machine cognitive capacity may soon rival or exceed human intelligence, prompting a fundamental question: what happens when the world built for humans must also serve machines?
According to a co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, the infrastructure and spaces designed around human cognition, cadence, and trust will increasingly be superseded or complemented by systems built for machine intelligence, wire speeds, and code-based contracts. In this new landscape, humans may no longer be the primary actors in environments of their own making, as both digital and physical bots become central to daily operations.
The shift will be felt most acutely in physical spaces. Homes, offices, stores, and public areas have been shaped by centuries of architectural design focused on human comfort, safety, and aesthetics. As robots populate workplaces and society, these locations will need to accommodate both humans and machines, requiring new architecture and design for human-machine cooperation. While building new structures is often slow and expensive, history shows that humans have repeatedly rebuilt their environment to accommodate new technologies.
Transportation offers the clearest precedent. Ancient Greek roads featured wheel ruts to guide carts over difficult terrain, railroads created new logistical hubs and changed land values, and mass-produced automobiles led to multilane highways, parking facilities, and the rise of suburbs. Autonomous vehicles are expected to trigger a similar wave of change. Unlike human drivers, who require parking near their destination, autonomous vehicles can drop off passengers and move on to other tasks or queue elsewhere. This could dramatically reduce the roughly 22% of land in large cities currently used for parking, freeing space for other uses. Merge lanes could shrink, roads could narrow, and sidewalks or bike lanes could expand. Without the need for steering wheels or pedals, the very shape of cars may change.
These changes are already beginning. In Dallas, Texas, efforts are underway to prepare for drone-based delivery services from Zipline, a company that began by speeding blood plasma delivery to remote hospitals in Rwanda and now delivers consumer goods from partners like Starbucks and DoorDash. Walmart, a primary partner in the region, is adapting its store design for drone operations. At one facility, workers have cut openings into the walls of a Supercenter so employees can load packages directly from the sales floor into the sky, bypassing the free-standing charging posts used initially. It is a small but symbolic crack in a retail architecture built for nearly a century around the assumption that the customer walking through the front door is human.
The impact could spread far beyond individual facilities. In August, Zipline announced a partnership with Uber to accelerate drone deliveries. Zipline co-founder Keller Cliffton noted that every great transportation revolution has changed where people live, how businesses operate, and how economies grow. Supply stations for Zipline may become purpose-built for these workflows, and new apartment buildings may be designed with convenient landing spots for drones on rooftops or courtyards.
While many efforts focus on humanoid robots that share our form and can operate in existing environments, it is likely that such machines will be outnumbered by robots with utilitarian shapes designed for efficiency. As former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick observed at the 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. The future, it seems, will be shaped not by machines that imitate humans, but by environments designed for machines that do not need to.
