Name: How AI can help solve housing supply challenges—and do it sustainably
Uploaded: 2024-04-10
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explains that in order to build 96,000 affordable homes by 2030, we need to leverage industrial processes powered by artificial intelligence.

Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost explains that in order to build 96,000 affordable homes by 2030, we need to leverage industrial processes powered by artificial intelligence.

How AI can help solve housing supply challenges—and do it sustainably

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph courtesy of Autodesk.

Leadership

So we actually did a project with MBH architects and a, an industrial manu construction company called Factory Os for a West Oakland housing development that not only was cheaper and Modu built, but it's actually a beautiful building and some of the sidings, some of the, the cladding, the curtain walls are actually made out of mushrooms fungus. All right. Ok. That's very California. It's a material that stores carbon. All right, it's very durable and can actually be shaped into anything you want it to be rather than using a plastic facade or something like that. It's actually a wonderful material. And can you eat it? I wouldn't recommend it. Ok. It's an industrial fungus. We've been doing these for a long time. I do not believe I've ever heard those two words put, put together before industrial fungus. So I'm gonna have to think about that one for a long time. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, a lot of what your product is used for is very creative, right? From designing buildings to special effects like you said. Yeah, totally. So, so on that on that front, you know, how far can this go? And what do you see on the creative side, the design side, what's the role of, you know, 10, 20 years out? What are humans still doing? How are, how are we still in the picture? Yeah. So we, we see a very collaborative future between A I and the human user. We do not, we do not see an adversarial relationship here. Does the A I ultimately put fewer people on each project. I guarantee you there will be fewer people on each project that builds or make something in the world in the future, but we'll be able to do more projects. And I think that matters over the next 20 years, you look to the future, the world is gonna be somewhere between eight and 10 billion people depending on which, which estimate you take right now. If, if you look at that, we're gonna be adding anywhere between 35 and 45 Tokyo's to the world every year between now and then. OK, that, that's a lot of new people, that's a lot of new infrastructure. So fundamentally, the industries we serve have a massive capacity problem and that capacity problems connected to. There's not enough money people or material to make and remake everything that needs to be made and remade without either destroying the planet or not being able to make it at all. Because you, you just can't have the capacity So we're very much focused on that capacity problem. And I'm gonna just share this stat from, from auto desk from you guys. Um that says that by 2030 96,000 new affordable homes must be built every day. So I'm curious actually on a more global level, what that looks like and tell us a little bit more about just the role that you think auto desk can play here that you're getting to the concept of why it's so important to apply industrial processes, these things. Because right now, if we try to make all those buildings with the current wasteful processes, we're, we're going to do some pretty damaging things with all of that housing required and one it, it's going to be expensive as well. Now, by the way, just to be perfectly clear, the cost of building a business isn't all that goes into making a particular housing project expensive. There are other things that come in there. However, the cost of building something is a big driver. So when you have to drive down the cost and you have to minimize the amount of material used because there's just not enough material to build all these things in a sustainable way. So if we can help people make repeatable choices that don't make the building ugly because this is the tension between the architecture profession and, and some of the things that we want to do with design technology is the goal is not to standardize everything and make it look like the same thing over and over again. Heaven forbid the goal is to help people minimize what they're doing and make choices that actually minimize the amount of material or the type of material in, in really interesting ways and drive down the cost per unit. You did an interesting interview with our fortune colleague, Diane Brady. Uh last year, she was working at a, at a different f publication at the time. But uh one of the things you said, really caught my attention, you said that that governments have a tendency to swing hard left or hard, right? And you're worried that they may try and slam the nail on A I and let other parts of the world run off with the innovation. Uh How do you think we're doing on that front? I, I think we're doing absolutely nothing. OK. Uh You know, and this is a, this is a problem here. OK? Because, you know, I'm not anti regulation. I think we need some regulation. We need rational regulation. Europe tends to overregulate the US, tends to under regulate when Miha and I talked, I, I told her that I thought the advertising model was one of the worst things that ever happened to tech. And there was a real reason why I said that and it's important as we think about A I when the advertising model started to create these tech giants and bigger isn't always better. Let's be very clear here. Just because something creates a huge tech company doesn't necessarily mean it's awesome. Ok, when the ads model took over, it created a disconnected for a long time, hadn't existed, it separated the needs of the end user from the needs of the customer. Most tech had been directly focused on the needs of the end users for its entire history. Then all of a sudden the customer was now the advertiser, not the end user. So here we are, we're heading into the world of A I. We already have this disconnect between the human using the technology and the person who is uh who is being uh the source of income for the technology. And now we're gonna lay our A I on and A IA I can either be a force for enhancing humanity or can be disconnected from the goals of humanity. I'm very nervous in the structure we have around certain large tech companies right now that there's going to be an increasing disal between the human centered needs and the the needs of the people that are funding the machine.