Billy Riggs (00:32)
So, you know, this is why I I I really think kind of this moves us to why cities matter. we spent, you know, clearly spent some time talking about city planning, and the importance of planners and site reconnaissance. Thank you, Hemelata Dandekar. and we'll put a link to your book in the in the show notes. but you know, when we think about cities, this is where

It's where AI and physical AI are being deployed. When we think about cities, this is where physical AI is being deployed. for example,

This is where you know, companies like Waymo and Zoox and Wayve and Baidu and Pony are deploying. It's we're gonna see construction robots. It's where we're gonna have a future of transit, like we're seeing in in Oslo and in Hamburg, that is robotic. we're we already have digital twins. and maybe the future really needs to be undergirded by things like

energy and better curb management infrastructure. Maybe we do, you know, despite kind of the data center pushback, maybe data centers need to be more of a thoughtful piece of urban architecture. maybe, you know, I I used to always say at conferences that we need to think about vertical takeoff and landing on tall, tall buildings. And you know, maybe we need to think about urban aerial logistics.

Urban logistics at lar you know at large, maybe urban area logistics and bicycles, pedestrians, and transits are become the core of our our our you know highly urban networks. And at the same time, you know, we have emergency responders, we have police and fire, that are inherently city issues. yes, they're urban issues, they they know cities of all different sizes.

But didn't you know it illustrates society's all these these functions are city functions. and I think therein lies kind of the American opportunity. and I I think the opportunity, whether or not you're you're you're France, you're Germany, or you're Japan, it's the the national opportunity that presents itself globally is to lead in

In urban entrepreneurship. I started talking about this on a subsack post. but you know, I think what it really kind of suggests is that cities are incubators and accelerators. they work in parallel with research and universities and and different capital layers.

To be a part of this physical AI and innovation ecosystems. And yes, universities and research institutions are strengths in that equation. But I don't think that the invention enough, this entrepreneurship ecosystem, sorry, but the and th Those are strengths, but simply the invention function, the entrepreneurial function, likely isn't enough anymore when when we look at kind of

our phases of growth, our phases of execution in the physical AI and the future of automation. And again, going back to this reference of the biggest points of friction being the challenges of integration, you know, the next phase beyond integration might be execution. We integrate and then we execute. How do we how do we train workers, modernize the permitting process? how do we make the procurement process to actually get this stuff more agile?

Can our universities be more agile? You know, I think then at the end of the day, you know, how do how do local governments who control the right of way on our streets, who control much of the physical architecture of cities, how do they become innovation partners instead of just just regul regulators with the police power? And in many times they aren't even the regulators, but they have the power of infrastructure.

And I think those questions matter than more than this idea of the breakthrough model, these issues of integration, these issues of execution, these issues that are really embedded at the local level. So, you know, in conclusion, we'll pick this up in in another episode. But for this, you know, short intro dialogue on physical AI, you know, I ask a question to start off: like, who builds AI?

If you had the answer, yes, it's the software engineers, it's the people

If you had

So maybe I leave you, maybe I'll leave us with the question where we started is kind of who builds the AI? If you had the answer that it's just the software engineers, maybe it's just only the tip of the iceberg. Maybe it's not only the the people building ChatGPT and Claude. You know, I think if we if we look into our crystal balls, you know, the future of physical AI is is bigger than.

computer science. It's about engineers and technicians and operators. It's about teachers and professors like me, fleet managers and public servants, and even city planners, in addition to the you know the valuable tech sector. And I think that's important to keep in mind, particularly as we see, you know, over the next couple months we're gonna see a lot of people get really wealthy as Anthropic goes public, as OpenAI goes public, but

You know, what undergirds our society may be really good for blue blue-collar employment. It may be really good for our labor workforce. And because it's their institutions that are gonna bring all this together. And that's what I think we're entering into with the physical AI economy. So you know what? Let's just not invent stuff, let's just not be entrepreneurs, let's build stuff.

thanks for listening to Rewiring the American Edge. And we'll talk to you in our next episode about what happens when automation. What happens when automation and physical AI leave the lab, leave places like autonomous vehicles in the city and get down to the street? what happens when, you know, where the the the they're there.

in terms of physical AI. I'm Billy Riggs and this has been a Rewiring the American Edge. Thanks for listening.