Planning and AI; a question of humanity
Simon Creer is the RTPI's Director of Communications
Recent news about various new AI platforms has made me think about Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel, On The Beach. It may seem like an odd connection but, spoiler alert, the novel ends after a submarine crew find that the mysterious morse code signal they have been following is simply a coke bottle tapping against a button.
The crew’s hope that the signal was from survivors of nuclear fall-out has doomed them to certain death. An inanimate object and technology has combined to catastrophic effect.
Now, you may think that this is hyperbole and overstatement in relation to the current landscape with AI, but I can’t help thinking about it.
The Government recently issued a tender for a planning tool that enables AI-augmented decision making for planning applications. The objective is to reduce processing times by half with a view to make them near instantaneous in the future.
Meanwhile, The Guardian has reported that a new software called Objector has been launched in order to help those who wish to object to planning applications. It apparently scans applications for grounds to object and then produces letters based on that.
It all feels a little bit strange, doesn’t it. One system supporting the planners to reduce processing time with AI-augmentation while another system is generating more data and seeking out further grounds to object. It’s not hard to imagine a time in which AI systems are being used to create plans while other AI systems are finding reasons to object.
Given we are supposed to operate under a discretionary system surely we need some humanity within that. If we don’t the whole system starts to resemble a coke bottle tapping a morse code button.
That is one of the reasons the RTPI has been thinking deeply about the impact of AI on planning and planners. The General Assembly this year heard from Dr Wei Yang on the potential for AI in the system, and a research paper will be produced in 2026 by our excellent research team.
However, there is no accounting for what other systems will be developed by other interested parties and how quickly they will develop.
That’s why I think it is important that as the AI bubble continues to expand and we find ourselves on the threshold of what could be a seismic shift as great as the Industrial Revolution we keep the humanity, the experts and the empathy within the system that produces the towns and communities we live in.
Planning is after all about people, not numbers.
There’s a saying that has been doing the rounds online in relation to AI for some time now, specifically about Large Language Models: ‘Why would I be bothered to read something that someone couldn’t be bothered to write?’
And that makes me wonder why we would live somewhere, raise our family somewhere or even voice objection to somewhere that we hadn’t bothered to use the expertise of planners around the country to design?
As the now infamous IBM slide from the 1970s said a machine cannot be held accountable so should never be put in a position of accountability. Planning officers are held accountable by their elected officials, those officials are held accountable by the electorate and that electorate has the opportunity to properly engage in the system. It may not be a perfect system and resource pressures certainly have their impact but can we really countenance handing it lock stock and barrel over to software.
Now, I know some of you will be thinking this makes me a Luddite, but that’s not the case. The key issue for me is that we go in with our eyes open and accept that change is coming. However, we mustn’t sacrifice expertise to the altar of speed and technology.
