Anna Ludmann
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This project, entitled Liberty/Overrule intends to explore and critique these emerging technologies and their application to society, as well as their use as a design tool in architecture and urbanism. It is a critical design project that extrapolates these emerging technological developments into a near future scenario in which generative AI has displaced a sufficiently large section of the workforce to necessitate a new economic settlement to replace market capitalism. The project proposes a “beta” trial for a labour-less city, where very few of the city’s population are required to work, and those that do, do so in order to oversee generative AI systems. Within this trial city, key infrastructure, services, and menial labour are provided by AI systems, freeing the population’s time for other pursuits, but requiring a certain level of compliance with rules set out by the AI system.
Liberty/Overrule
On 12 July 2022, text to image generative AI MidJourney was launched, only four months' before ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot was made available by OpenAI.
Both releases are part of a wider ecosystem of generative AI developments within the last 12 months that will have profound effects on the future of work, creativity, employment, intellectual property, the infrastructural systems, and politics, to name but a few.
Through exploring the potential of the way that humanity might use these emerging technologies, we can better equip ourselves to be active participants in discussions about the future. Neither utopia nor dystopia, the project proposes and critiques both the likely manner that humanity will use its greater free time, but also the benefits, biases, and inconsistencies of AI, and therefore imagines what a possible future will look like when AI is used to govern our urban realm.
