The Crucible of Change
Beyoncé, AI, and the City of Tomorrow
This year’s Grammy Awards, held in tinseltown-turned-tinderbox Los Angeles, were a glimpse into contemporary culture—one in which creation, destruction, and resilience were the meta-themes of the night. Doechii, the “Swamp Princess,” won Best Rap Album with her quirky brand of alternative hip hop, but was bested for Best New Artist by queer-pop “Midwest Princess,” Chappell Roan. “Queen Bey” Beyoncé cemented her reign by winning both Album of the Year and Best Country Album for Cowboy Carter, a boundary-pushing blend of bluegrass, folk, and Louisianan zydeco. Her alt-country victory over some more traditional sounds provoked a lot of all-too-familiar noise online from certain alt-right types who didn’t appreciate her breaking country norms. Yet across the country, from La La Land to MAGA-Land, we see that norms can be broken, tastes change, the culture evolves, and incumbents adapt or disappear. If Beyoncé’s victory symbolized cultural evolution, the Grammy stage was an apt metaphor for a city whose identity is linked to both reinvention and transformation—even as the fires outside reminded us of the struggles cities face when forced to confront upheaval.
The Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires killed almost 30 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures including 5,500 homes, and consumed roughly 60 square miles—equivalent to 29,000 football fields or three Manhattans. They came at a time when LA was already facing an acute housing shortage and homelessness crisis, and everyone knows that this will only make things much worse. Crisis has changed the norms, and the city must now reimagine how it houses and protects its residents. The land use and permitting reforms that LA ought to undertake now should have been undertaken long before the first ember blew down Temescal Canyon on the Santa Ana winds.
The solutions are clear. One part is technical and technological: updating building codes and using safer materials and designs, like flame-retardant siding, ember-resistant vents, and firebreak landscaping. Another is regulatory: cutting red tape, repealing restrictive zoning, loosening California’s onerous coastal and environmental laws. A tougher part will be figuring out how to insure and finance the rebuilding effort. But the deepest challenge lies in overcoming California’s “Culture of No,” the entrenched resistance to change that has long hindered housing construction. Because the future of LA is not going to be—cannot be—the same as the past. The Real Deal reports that the city needed to build around 460,000 homes by 2030 before the fires, but it was falling well short of the annual targets required to meet that goal. Just as the fires have displaced residents of Pacific Palisades and Altadena into other parts of the city, the solution will also have to be countywide across the vast swathe of municipalities we call “Los Angeles.”
Like Beyoncé’s turn toward country, change provokes resistance, and not everyone will like it—but even more disruptive change is blowing in the wind.
Over the past five years, we’ve seen how technology has dramatically changed the workplace, and thereby changed the way people use cities. I’ve written recently about how self-driving autonomous vehicles are going to cause further disruptions. Both trends will present new opportunities, too, but the point is, remote work and AVs are changing cities whether we like it or not—the only question for us is how do we adapt to this world. As I watched the Grammys, I was thinking how another technology—artificial intelligence—could transform our way of life, entire industries, and our cities. The spark of AI has been lit, and it will soon burn across the landscape of the old American economy.
Less than two years after Hollywood writers went on strike to protest it, AI is already reshaping aspects of film production including visual effects, audience engagement, and, yes, screenwriting. The technology has improved so rapidly that many actors, artists, and other “creatives” are already worried that it will eventually commoditize and replace their roles. Spotify, which tells me that my top song of 2024 was Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” is already using AI to generate tracks. Will Beyoncé be made obsolete by AI, or will she follow the lead of Grimes and create a licensable AI version of herself? These fears reflect the anxiety facing workers in other sectors, as well.
While AI spells massive disruption for LA’s entertainment industry, it will affect just about every other industry, too. AI will build financial models, write legal contracts, create personalized nutrition plans, evaluate lab results, and produce research reports—all much faster than any human can. Such disruption is understandably terrifying, painful to experience, and unwelcome in an era that feels like one convulsion after another.
But striking won’t stop studios, or any other business, from using such a valuable tool. Fact is, all creatives are going to have to find new ways to amplify their creativity—including writers here on Substack. We should prepare for, rather than resist, a future of change.
argues that the “future of humanity is management,” one in which everyone can be a CEO of an AI team. The AI revolution will unfold unevenly and bumpily: those jobs with few barriers to automation—like call centers—will go first; those that have a physical labor component or that prize in-person interactions or that are protected by licenses and unions will last longer. He foresees “a world of dramatically expanded human agency” where the “qualities that will be at a premium are taste, judgment, vision, and courage.” It’s that human element that will matter most in the AI economy. Similarly, in a “strategy memo for humans,” contends that AI, like previous technologies, will commoditize and reduce the costs of many skills, freeing humans to focus on creating novel experiences and unique value. In his view, “Humans are not being commoditized. Certain things that we thought only we could do are.” Succeeding in this environment means becoming a complement to AI, not something that AI can substitute.While McCormick and Crawford see AI as a great amplifier of human productivity, not everyone agrees.
, who admits he has “never consciously used any A.I. program,” questions why we even need AI. For those already thriving as creatives, the critique makes sense. But for others, AI offers affordable tools like proofreading, research, and graphic design that were once out of reach. What Barkan misses is that AI is already doing this.Cities, too, must become complements to the cultural and technological shifts already underway. One way is to embrace AI-driven technologies to streamline or enhance urban planning, approval processes, and disaster preparedness and response efforts—tasks often stalled by bureaucratic inertia and political resistance. Another is to prepare for its impact on the built environment: a world in which we all become solopreneurs running AI teams could further undermine the need for office buildings. Cities have already authorized office-to-residential conversions in response to remote work, but future needs may include converting offices to data centers to power AI computation. Even if AI finally renders the office obsolete, people will still want to live near other people in cities, especially if AI technology becomes our primary workmate. The question of what makes cities not merely survivable but livable will ultimately come back to what makes them the most human.
But technology alone cannot overcome political inertia or the all-too-human resistance to change.
Cities have always been crucibles of cultural innovation and evolution—but the pace of change in the built environment lags that of the culture. Calamities, however devastating and horrific, wipe the slate clean not only of what was once built, but of what was once thought. They present an opportunity to rethink the way we have done things, the way we have built, and to chart a different course. LA is grappling with the confluence of man-made and natural disasters, and now has an opportunity to do something different, better. Many other cities are also struggling to contend with self-inflicted wounds. In the absence of some external forcing mechanism, most are muddling through, but cultural and technological evolution may force a reckoning.
As the fires die down, the question isn’t whether the future will bring disruptive change, it’s whether we can harness that change in a way that makes urban life more livable and human. Ultimately, that will take, as Crawford says, “taste, judgment, vision, and courage.” To echo Cowboy Carter, giddy up.