A New Manhattan Project

Would you rather have the handful of individuals who design and control the world’s artificial intelligence apparatus reside in Manhattan or Mountain View? Some might say it doesn’t matter — isn’t this, after all, a placeless technology? Isn’t it a repository of deepfakes and bad takes, disconnected from the fleeting realities we treasure? Like watching “Oppenheimer,” we feel the relentless march of history again bringing us to the supposed brink of disaster for the many, all to benefit the few. But if the advent of artificial intelligence is indeed inevitable, shouldn’t the thrall of New York City rather than the sprawl of Silicon Valley be its epicenter? Shouldn’t a new Mayor Zohran Mamdani fight to make this so, and in so doing not only create a bigger source for our tax base, but better odds for the human race?

What if the origination point of new technologies influenced their societal impact and outcome? A decade ago, I got a taste of this question as a design consultant for a Google subsidiary called Sidewalk Labs, which no longer exists despite some successful spin-offs and laudable thought experiments. Famously, surveillance concerns derailed Sidewalk’s grand plan to build a new high-tech district on Toronto’s waterfront. 

Meetings at Sidewalk were often like a game of coastal bumper cars with East Coast urbanites crashing into West Coast suburbanites. The New Yorkers would talk about the limitations on autonomous vehicles due to a finite number of urban traffic lanes — which today’s debates about whether Waymo should operate in Gotham make all the more pertinent — while the Californians would talk about flying cars. In one clarifying moment, a Stanford engineer spoke, without irony, of a future implant in his future head that would seamlessly guide him as he drove to customized sightseeing locations. In yet another, a West Coast “architect” spoke of a housing solution that fully violated wheelchair and fire codes, about which he shrugged and said “we can override all that.”

Technology is never culturally neutral. It is a mirror and window into the society that creates it, including where that society lives. More than one tech exec has told me that most of the people who run our tech companies today are geographically isolated social misfits who want to create a different world in part because the one the rest of us inhabit eludes them. You might dislike tech billionaire Michael Bloomberg, but even as he flew in private planes he sometimes rode the subway as mayor, creating at least the semblance of eyeball-to-eyeball interaction among people of different means and miens. It’s the difference between the friction that tech companies want to eliminate and the friction we want to celebrate. That positive social friction is not only the hallmark of New York City, but the building block of an emotional intelligence that could build more humane artificial intelligence.

It is precisely that eyeball-to-eyeball urban energy that aspiring tech talent, like most young adults, want from their lives. Mayor Bloomberg helped diversify the economy by making New York an epicenter for technology companies, breaking the singular grip Wall Street had on the city’s economy for decades prior. Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island wouldn’t exist if not for his administration; NYU Tandon and other institutions of innovation would be far weaker. Entire New York neighborhoods have been remade, for good and bad, by the influx of major tech companies into buildings new and old, from piers and historic structures to new skyscrapers. Technology company leaders may be reclusive suburbanites, but increasingly their lieutenants have sought out urbanity. That influx helped to transform a municipal budget of about $43 billion at the time of 9/11 to over $116 billion today, funds that helped pay for de Blasio’s signature universal pre-K program, among other public goods.

What a difference a decade makes.

In 2019 Amazon’s HQ2 was scared away from Long Island City by New York’s left flank, who among other concerns loathed the tech giant’s labor record and its threat to small businesses. But wouldn’t we have been better off shaping Amazon’s future here in America’s organized labor capital — where it would’ve had to play by New York rules and acclimate to New York culture? That’s what the late union stalwart Hector Figueroa sanely argued, as did I. 

However repugnant you may find these technology giants, you must ask yourself whether “an out of sight out of mind” strategy that pushes them to suburban locations serves either our city or society better than locating them here, where our politics can influence them while we benefit from their economic activity.

Mayor-elect Mamdani won on an ambitious affordability agenda, including free buses, expanded child care and new housing production, all of which will require public funding. It’s unlikely that will all come from new taxes, particularly with the governor entering an election year. Perhaps our energetic new mayor can focus on targeted but expansive growth for the city’s economy — thinking about how, if the inexorable wave of new A.I. technologies were to locate here in addition to the Bay Area, it could help us pay for our most dire social needs. 

Perhaps critical questions, like the voracious electricity demands of the A.I. industry, could help focus minds on helping us create a cleaner electrical grid, including new transmission capacity. Perhaps these new companies could locate along our glorious but vulnerable waterfronts, helping us to meet our resilience goals in the face of sea-level rise.

But most significantly, perhaps the collective culture of New York City, rather than the individualistic nature of California, could influence the purpose and performance of artificial intelligence and our common tech future because the people who create it would live in neighborhoods, ride mass transit and understand the glorious friction of our common bonds. Perhaps the camaraderie that our sidewalks and subways imbue could create empathy alongside efficiency, could create a world in which technology serves us, instead of perpetuating the nagging sense that it is we who will serve it.