If there was any city perfectly suited to the message of sustainability and resilience, it’s Amsterdam. The city’s braved challenges from sea and scarce resources to be universally lauded for its ingenuity, adaptability and determination to succeed.
Its leadership in sustainability is legendary. Things like bio receptive concrete might capture your imagination. It’s research into how to grow moss on concrete, which softens the harsh surface, cleans passing air and water and provides an acoustic softener as well, according to the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Metropolitan Solutions.
There’s many more initiatives. Density for instance. Driving around what we’ll call the beautiful canal district of the city the streets are lined close to the pavement with four storey apartment buildings. They’re all butted hard up against the pavement, but each has its own unique architectural flavour while retaining a collegiate feel with its neighbours. The result is not at all crammed or congested and the street life seems to benefit.
This completely bypasses the disgruntled taxi driver Wednesday night taking one jetlagged correspondent back from the networking event a few hours early. The city had changed he said, grasping for evidence, it felt. It was no longer as free as it was: too many one way streets making you circle for 40 minutes to get back to where you were near Central Station. And worse, he complained, was the country’s determination to always be first: in green energy, in electric cars, in anything green.
Sigh, we thought: oh, to have your problems.
We’re here as guest of Bentley Systems to cover the company’s annual event and Year in Infrastructure awards, but primarily to pick up threads of what AI has in store for the built environment sector and how a such software company that specialises in global infrastructure is meeting the challenge.
Right from day 1 the mood was tech heavy, as you’d expect, the audio visual elements underscoring a future of that at the tipping point of overwhelming us at any moment. The enormous screen, for instance, in the main event room surrounded three sides, and the opening visuals loomed first with menacing soaring images of roiling seas, then dramatic flythroughs over vast city scapes, zeroing in on fine details to emphasise both the geo-spatial and micro level of detail needed to build enormous infrastructure.
That AI was undeniable; only problem is we still don’t know what it wants, what it will get us to do and how much we’ll get paid, if anything.
What’s certain is that anyone who controls this beast will be rich beyond dreams – if they can control the trajectory of its Frankenstein-ish evolution, that is.
Already the magnetic attraction of capital may have already outperformed the famed Dutch tulip bubble of the 17th century when extraordinary prices were paid for prized ownership of the best tulip bulbs. Only to crash of course.
That strange human pattern of intense attraction to the point the thing at the centre implodes into a black hole is the organic superstructure that defeats so many economists. Wish as they might that they could be as precise as the working of mathematicians and physicists. But they can’t. Their profession is instead held hostage by the weird and uncontrollable world of human ambition, discovery and vast propensity for mistakes.
Which is what amplifies the disruptive potential of AI and what’s at stake when it’s applied to the built environment and where hugely expensive infrastructure is concerned.
As a way to illustrate the stakes, there’s the news this week that Mark Zuckerberg recently succeeded in finally poaching Perth boy genius Andrew Tulloch (watch that name).
Tulloch co founded Thinking Machine Lab with (by all accounts) the equally brilliant Albanian born Mira Murati, in a venture valued at $12 billion, after Aussie “battlers” Square Peg and Airtree Ventures tried to invest more than $ 1 billion into the startup founded just in February this year, according to the the AFR,
Zuckerberg who has been desperate to stop feeling like he’s flailing around in the slipstream of AI denied he’d earlier offered Tulloch a $2.3 billion package to make the jump to Meta, but it’s known he paid $US14.3 billion for nearly half of Scale AI.
This was the kind of energy – and chat – rippling through the underpinnings of the Bentley event.
Right from the start the Bentley leaders had no hesitation in admitting there were massive opportunities in play but also enormous challenges with AI.
(Why did we keep imagining a Darth Vader kind of beast roaring around a corral and refusing to be lassoed?).
What was coming down the AI pike was fast. In just one year since last year’s event, said chief executive Nicholas Cumins, AI had soared.
Cumins, by the way is the first non family member to be appointed to lead the company, which was started 40 years ago by five brothers – four of whom are engineers.
He later told The Fifth Estate after his keynote that yes, he was optimistic AI could help solve our sustainability and climate problems.
The take up by clients working on these areas had soared, he said, his hand arcing vertically to demonstrate.
The room burst with questions when Cumins sat alongside chief technology officer Julien Moutte for the “Ask Me Anything” session, specifically for the press and analysts.
A standout question came from Anupama Madhok Sud, director and editor of India’s Water Digest, who wanted to know if the AI enhanced tech could help identify potential failures in the many ageing dams India now has to contend with.
There was a plethora of questions around how to ensure the integrity of the information going into tech systems (garbage in, garbage out).
There were concerns about how to ensure ownership of data and outputs that were created with a) the company’s software and b) those that came from the combination of the client’s data, the software and AI’s input, which was likely to source the entire internet for grist.
Legal expert Anne-Marie Friel, partner with Pinsent Masons said during a panel on day 1 moderated by Mark Coates of Bentley and including Yeunjin Kim of Mott MacDonald and Guy Beaumont of Turner and Townsend, that it was critical to get the human side of the infrastructure projects correct.
This was even harder than ensuring data integrity, she said.
Joan Michelson, a reporter-producer, from Forbes and host of the exquisitely named Electric Ladies Podcast, brought the focus onto sustainability.
It goes without saying, Cumins said, embedded in the software are carbon calculations. What an AI enhanced system can do is slash the time and cost of infrastructure – each producing its own a sustainability dividend.
In a later interview chief sustainability and education officer Chris Bradshaw and global sustainability director Rodrigo Fernandes said sustainability and ethics were firmly embedded in the foundations that the Bentley brothers established and continued today.
The Fifth Estate travelled to Amsterdam and attended the conference as a guest of Bentley Systems. More stories to come.