Avery was proud of her contribution to the district as the opening day tickets lay next to the keyboard. Maxwell Park was about to open, with a special RF-free section. While Avery didn’t fully believe people were truly RF-sensitive, the ability to off-net was valuable (even the MedAI said so), and if the side effect was that people who were diagnosed with the sensitivity felt better, then who was Avery to complain?
This should have been straightforward, but trying to find and source the nearly invisible tensile dome for the active faraday cage was quite a task. Avery clicked back through the design history viewing past iterations, and laughed at what the AI came up with. The construction AI didn’t believe it could be done, and was stuck in a loop for days at a time testing out various parametrics - all of them with some sort of net.
In the end, Avery’s coworker had the idea to ask the AI to try inverting the mesh and calculating from there. This flash of insight had come after a quick weekend to Barcelona to see the still incomplete cathedral. Avery wanted to see it too, but the wait on the ballistic flights were long, and there were other areas less flood-affected to visit. With the AI thinking through the problem from another angle, Avery also asked it to look at the Labrouste library in Paris for inspiration. That seemed to knock the AI out of some generative loop, and with a little editing the design was frozen.
But for now, the construction fleet was showing 99% complete on the status bar. Soon the robots would deem construction substantially complete, then the inspection robots would take their time, finally letting actual human inspectors after they deem it safe - which it rarely was. Avery didn’t trust the inspection routines, preferring to send in the camera dog until the inspectors had their time. Avery had dodged falling material or arcing electricals enough for one career already.
View more of Avery’s Journey.
Elsewhere
🔮 Fernando Gutierrez interviews Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Laboratory for Compass, the magazine of the Association of Professional Futurists
👑 𝗜𝗳 𝗜 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 👑
Day 2: Mixed use by default, with diverse home types
If I were the king of zoning in America, these would be the days two policy proposals I would implement, in order to increase abundance, reduce cost of housing, and make sure that everyone has access to a safe home.
All the famous streets in America - Bourbon, Broadway, Beacon - all have offices, restaurants, or stores on the ground floor with more up above or homes above. Mixed use should be the default city-wide. We need to allow a wider range of home types to match American's needs. We need: single room occupan- cies, co-housing, tiny homes, duplexes, fourplexes, and all the missing middle housing we used to build.
See more policy proposals here.