Will AI replace the role of the Planner?

Fact and fiction are intertwined

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting all the attention these days. For the first time, it simultaneously exists in our imaginations and in our realities. AI abruptly entered our daily lives only very recently, allowing us to start seeing the implications of its potential in real-time. Is it a benign assistant that will take humanity to levels of development never thought possible? Or will it take over our jobs, lives and societies, perhaps eventually deciding to kill us of in a bout of digital spring-cleaning? The truth is, nobody really knows, and speculation is the fast money of the day.

The Planning Institute of Australia recently decided to engage with both sides of the AI conversation and made it the topic of the Institute’s 2023 Great Debate: Artificial Intelligence Will Replace the Role of a Planner.

The debate premise suggests that AI has the potential to impact Planning significantly. Specifically, “AI supplements Planners’ decision-making process through data analysis, modelling, urban design visualizations, and handling extensive data sets. In the current situation, the big question that emerges is how influential AI would be in replacing the role of Planners?”

I was asked to speak last for the Proposition; that is, the team in favour of the motion. The team tasked with convincing a room of Planners that AI would eventually replace them regardless of whether they chose to accept that or not. Not a popular position to take, but somebody had to do it!

This week, I’m happy to share my script from the 2023 Great Debate with readers of Sights on Cities. My talk was meant to provoke as much as convince, to entertain as well as inform. Ultimately it sought to turn and look at an uncomfortable question while not forgetting to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I hope you enjoy it!

I.

Dear esteemed members of the audience…

It is with great pleasure that I take the podium to offer summation of my side (the proposition), while sealing the fate of our counterparts on the other side.

Let me pay gentle tribute to the efforts of our opponents. Indeed, I might go so far as to even acknowledge some of their arguments as persuasive, though not convincing. They were a little like AI art: superficially distracting but lacking any real depth or merit.

AI ‘art’ - all substance, no soul.

II.

And so it is to the conclusion that we turn. The conclusion of this debate, this event, and of the Planning profession. Much as this night turns late, so too does the time of Planning as a human responsibility.

As sure as day turns to night, AI will consume our profession just as surely as it is devouring others. They all said it couldn’t happen: the accountants, the lawyers, the OnlyFans girls. But it did.

Like the black goo of science fiction, AI is quickly colonising wholesome and questionable professions alike.

If e-thots can’t withstand AI, what chance have Planners? Sex sells yet AI is already offering better deals. What hope have we?!

III.

I won’t exhaustively rehash the compelling arguments put forward by my esteemed colleagues. No doubt you have already been convinced by their erudite and forensic prosecutions. Their arguments stack up but let us raise our gaze further.

You see, when it comes to question of whether AI will replace the role of the Planner, there is already only one answer. The die has been cast, the battle is lost, the bullets were blanks and the Planners are done.

“Welcome to the Planning Department. For DA, speak to the robots on the left; for Strategic, the middle robots, and the one on the right for Enforcement matters.”

IV.

For you see there are great forces at play, operating at high altitude, and they have already sealed our fate. Let us consider the three that will intertwine over time and render us all professionally obsolete.

First is the sad but certain reality that AI will take over the profession because Planners and their employers will find it irresistible to use. This over-dependence will lead to a point where human Planners are too disorganised and under-skilled to stop AI finally replacing them. They’re also too expensive for their employers to want to protect.

The second damning force is that the Planning profession and its representative bodies will have no success building support to halt the AI take-over.

We failed to make ourselves relevant in the minds of the public when we were necessary. It will be a silent coup by AI and the public largely won’t care. A rear-guard PR campaign of cringy ‘planning is cool’ TikTok videos won’t save our profession now.

Third: the long-term reality of politics trumping Planning will assist the AI take-over. Watch as politicians cheer AI as a more cost-effective and efficient use of taxpayer’s money. They won’t mourn the decline of the human Planner, nor the loss to civil society, as we all move one step closer to digital dystopia.

V.

So, my friends, there is only one outcome here, only one conclusion to this debate: AI will replace the role of the Planner, there’s nothing we can do to stop it, and we are already setting the conditions of our own obsolescence.

As Agent Smith, the sneering villain of the Matrix movies famously said, never send a human to do a machine’s job.

My dear members of the audience, the proposition rests.