The revolutionary technology holds immense promise — and clear risks.
Call it the Jetsons Fallacy. In the animated TV series “The Jetsons,” the world of the future was one in which technology was different, but the economic and social order of mid-20th-century America was unchanged. The Jetsons were a single-earner family with a father who worked for an industrial company and a mother who was a homemaker, helped with the housework by a robot maid. The family’s single flying car was used to commute from a high-rise apartment to the job site, shopping malls and schools, all of which were similar to those of the 1950s and 1960s, apart from being raised high above the earth on stilts. Even the architecture was that of the would-be “futuristic” Googie style that was often used for diners, airports, commercial strips and apartment buildings after World War II.
All too often, today’s discussions of the possible impact of AI and other innovative technologies on the structure of the city are marred by this same fallacy. For example, too often prognosticators debate the effect that self-driving cars might have on commuting, while assuming that the locations of production and residence will remain unchanged. But we know from the history of the industrial era in the last two-and-a-half centuries that major changes in technology lead to the radical restructuring of urban patterns, by altering where goods and services are produced and where workers, managers and capitalists live, shop and are entertained.
During the millennia of the agrarian economy that preceded the beginnings of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries, both production sites and dwellings were decentralized. Most people in agrarian societies were farm laborers — enslaved, free or subject to feudal overlords. They or nearby village craftsmen produced most of the tools and clothes and other items they needed at the local level. Long-distance trade was limited to luxury goods for the ruling classes who for the most part derived their wealth from ownership of land or labor. The only large cities in agrarian civilizations were ceremonial centers around palaces or temples and a few major port cities that specialized in trade.
The impact of industrialization
This pattern changed dramatically with the first wave of industrialization, based on steam-powered factories. Agglomerations of factories sprang up in places like Manchester and Pittsburgh that were near coal deposits or canals or railroads or ports that could bring coal to power steam engines. Pistons, pulleys and belts allowed factories to rise vertically. The children of farm families streamed in from the countryside to become wage workers. They lived in crowded vertical tenements near the vertical factories, warehouses and shops where they worked, often in miserable conditions for low pay.
For the first — and perhaps the last — time in history, material production was concentrated in cities which, by earlier standards, were gigantic. But the heyday of the densely crowded factory city was brief. Even in the steam era, trolleys and commuter trains allowed the well-to-do and some workers to escape from crowded conditions to homes in green suburbs that ringed the factory towns.
Decentralization accelerated during the second industrial revolution, based on the internal combustion engine and electricity. Once grid-distributed electric power replaced on-site coal-powered steam engines, industrial plants no longer needed to be located near canals or railroads that could deliver coal. Factories could now be built on cheap former farmland. Electric conveyor belts replaced vertical pistons and pulleys, enabling vast one-story factories to replace the vertical factories of the steam era. Trucks replaced railroads in taking products to warehouses and markets.
Each wave of innovation since the second industrial era has tended to further decentralize work and home.
Widespread car ownership allowed the masses as well as the classes to escape from filthy, crowded tenements to suburban single-family homes and low-density apartment complexes. Thanks to automobility, ordinary people as well as elites could live in one place, work in another and shop elsewhere. Shopping malls and commercial strips alongside parking lots sprang up at highway intersections. Thanks to radio and television, entertainment moved partly into the suburban home.
The factory city gives way to the managerial city
As industrial production moved out of the cities, the factory city gave way to the managerial city. Downtowns specialized in administrative services. Large corporations with production sites across the country, coordinated by telephone and by occasional visits by head-office managers making airline trips, sometimes moved their national headquarters to a few big cities like New York and Chicago. Downtown office buildings contained floor after floor of mostly male middle managers and almost entirely female typists and clerks, producing paperwork for bureaucratic corporations, government agencies and nonprofits. The downtowns filled up and emptied each day, as managers and clerks and support staff commuted to and from the suburbs.
Nostalgic for steam-era neighborhoods in which work, residences and shopping were accessible by foot or by trolley, many intellectuals after World War II denounced “sprawl” as dehumanizing and ugly. But suburbia was less dehumanizing to working-class families than crowded, filthy tenement neighborhoods had been. And the aesthetic preferences of some urbanist thinkers for dense cities could not overcome the cost savings of decentralization to businesses and workers alike.
The first wave of the information revolution, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, led to the latest transformation of the city. The legions of typists and bookkeepers and their supervisors have vanished, replaced by laptops and software, or by workers in foreign countries to whom office services have been offshored, thanks to the Internet and wireless telephony and satellite communications. Some major corporations, law firms and accounting firms still pay top dollar for trophy buildings in the downtowns of major cities like New York and San Francisco. But most businesses, like most workers, have moved to the suburbs.
Just as the factory city gave way to the managerial city, so the managerial city is being replaced by the amenity city.
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) can be viewed as the second information revolution, following the earlier development of computers and the Internet. AI and robotics promise to wipe out routine labor, both physical and intellectual. Even if some lost manufacturing is reshored in the U.S., reversing the trend of offshoring, the new factories are likely to be highly automated and sited on cheap rural land.
AI may decimate the two traditional bases of the middle class — small business owners and professionals. The retail sector may undergo mass extinction, as autonomous wheeled or flying “motherships” and last-mile drones increase the ability of consumers to order products for home delivery.
Professions that depend on access to codified knowledge, like the legal and medical and academic professions, are likely to be replaced in part by AI, with the jobs of practitioners redefined as tasks that only human beings can do. Many, if not most of the professionals who survive the culling of their fields by AI in the long run will probably be allowed to telecommute from home offices, because the cost of paying for downtown or suburban office buildings refilled and then emptied again by commuting workers each weekday will outweigh the dubious benefits.
The rise of the amenity city
Just as the factory city gave way to the managerial city, so the managerial city is being replaced by the amenity city. A few major corporations will keep offices downtown for reasons of status. But successful post-managerial downtowns are being transformed by gentrification into residential neighborhoods for the rich and vacation sites for tourists. The needs of the downtown rich and tourists are catered to by workers who provide amenity services — workers who themselves often must commute long distances to and from suburbs and exurbs, because they cannot afford to live downtown.
The development of safe self-driving cars may lead to the extinction of passenger rail and commuter bus transit, except in a few dense downtowns and airports. Whether autonomous vehicles are personally owned or rented from companies like Uber and Lyft, most lower-income as well as affluent commuters are likely to prefer personal point-to-point transit to mass transit with fixed routes shared with strangers. Freed from the need to steer cars themselves, and able to spend commuting time working or talking to others or being entertained, people may tolerate longer commutes, with the result being even greater distance between home and workplace, where local geography permits.
For some workers, particularly those in the expanding health care and elder care trades, the AI-infused vehicle may become a traveling hospital or workshop. The present pattern in which ambulances ferry patients to hospitals might be partly replaced by one in which emergency service vehicles, linked to hospitals, can perform many tests or limited surgery at the patient’s home. And tomorrow’s highways and streets may be full of the vans of plumbers, HVAC repair workers, physical therapists and others who have to travel to work in the homes or offices of their clients.
The future will hold surprises, as always. But the concentration of production and dwellings in dense steam-era factory cities was a historical fluke. Each wave of innovation since the second industrial era of automobiles, airplanes and electricity has tended to further decentralize work and home. AI is likely to continue the trend. To expect the patterns of today’s cities and occupations to be frozen or reversed, while technological advances are limited to vehicles and appliances, is to repeat the mistake of many of yesterday’s futurists — to commit the Jetsons Fallacy.