The Sentient City: Visions of a Hyper-Cognitive Neourbanism

Abstract

As we proceed through the technological zeitgeist of the 21st century, we are encountering increasing amounts of challenges to our existing paradigms. One of such challenges is the ever-expanding integration of automata throughout our socio-ecological niche, leading to the rise of Artificial Intelligence as a catalyst for an unprecedented shift in the way we will think and live. It is this radical shift in our collective efforts in technological pioneering which forces us to confront the questions that fundamentally reconsiders us and our place in the ecosystem and beyond. We have evidently already expressed our curiosities and concerns culturally through film and literature in the better part of the last century, from works depicting A.I. as benevolent entities and transcendent guardians to dystopian existential threats. In any case, it will inevitably be an intensely dramatic paradigm shift not unlike the transitions from the hunter-gatherers into agricultural revolution and 12,000 years later into the industrial revolution. This thesis speculates on the roles and potentialities of artificial Super-Intelligence as not only architectural tools but co-existing agents that will reform the way we think and live. Based on the works of futurists the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Arthur C. Clarke, we examine the historical progression, depictions and implications of this exponentially expanding nature of cognitive technologies and its effects on the relationship between living environments of the future and its inhabitants. This investigation proposes an ultramodern perspective on the proposition of an autonomous AI system that is not only capable of permutationally shaping architectural territories according to our needs and desires, but also challenging our pre-existing notions of anthropocentric urban ecologies. Delving into a hypothesis of Auckland in the year 2052, drawing upon the memories of the Waitemata harbour and imagining it implemented within this futurist narrative. By exploring both digital and analogue workflows we can synthesize known A.I. design methodologies with speculative and philosophical implications informed by the works of Kurzweil and other futurists, and distill into the urban condition reconfigured ideals of a dynamic and cognitive approach to public amenities in the late 21st century. The Architectural language will describe temporal infrastructural solutions proposed by human innovators and augmented by Super-intelligent systems which would account for the possible challenges encountered within the next half decade, such as overpopulation and climate change.