The way Australians drive, walk, plant trees and even sort rubbish could be managed through artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, according to the country’s leading property and innovation experts.
AI is a relatively new concept in urban planning, construction and infrastructure, and the Australian property industry is attempting to unpack how the new technology could impact its work over the next 10 years.
What the experts are saying
The APP Group business and innovation lead Camille Jasson said it was crucial the industry began interrogating how AI can work for it.
Overseas we’re seeing examples of AI and hardware coming together to drive buses without bus drivers, treat wastewater, repair infrastructure autonomously, build solar panel farms and design buildings – these are countries that are also experiencing labour shortages and aging populations, so we really need to look to them as examples.
Jeremie Henry from Procore Technology, a company that works in construction software, and said AI was already being used in Helsinki, Boston and Seoul to improve housing, traffic movement and urban heat.
The benefits are vast, from productivity gains to new jobs creation to attracting and retaining talent,” he said.
There is an important opportunity here for government, academia and industry to come together to pave the way forward.
AI already at work in Australia
AI is already at work in Australian cities, including in Darwin and Melbourne.
In Darwin, over a hundred new CCTV cameras around its central business district were deployed in 2019 as part of its “Switching on Darwin” project.
The project used vision from the cameras to inform its city planning — for example, it captured pedestrians’ movements, traffic patterns and vehicle information to look at ways the city could improve traffic flow and public access in the future.
Thousands of kilometres away in Melbourne, AI was also used to monitor waste disposal.
The City of Melbourne used cameras to monitor one of its garbage compactors, and AI collated data about both what was going to waste, or if there were any potentially dangerous items being thrown away.
It also uses AI in its “urban forest strategy”, which tracked more than 70,000 trees in the City of Melbourne area and logged their age, diversity and health status.
Tracking the trees helped the city decide how it would go about future planting, what streets it should prioritise, and how the city was impacted by climate change.
Ms Jasson said AI created a huge amount of opportunity for city planners and governments across the board, and it was time to think about its deployment on a bigger scale.
“I would say that at the moment we don’t have the human capacity to build the infrastructure or housing that we need to meet our rate of growth as a country,” she said.
“In the construction industry alone 300,000 brand new workers are required over the next five years to deliver the pipeline of projects that’s been earmarked by the public and private sector.”
“We haven’t even gotten into the number of humans it takes to maintain and run our cities.”
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