Designing the Future

Modern cities are the most complex and fragile structures ever built. A single power failure can cascade into chaos. A single pandemic can turn density into a death sentence. A single metre of sea-level rise can displace hundreds of millions. But for the first time in ten thousand years, there is an alternative. THE LAST CITY describes a civilisation in which every home generates its own energy, harvests its own water, grows a portion of its own food, recycles its own waste, monitors its own health, and connects to the world by satellite.

The machines are already here. They diagnose diseases, trade stocks, drive trucks, and manage the supply chains that keep civilization running. Most of us barely notice. But the quiet accumulation of autonomous capability is approaching a threshold beyond which everything changes: the nature of work, the distribution of wealth, the quality of our collective decisions, and even what it means to be a person.

What if everything that makes you you could fit on two pages? Boris Kriger lost his mother when his son was four. Years later, using nothing but memory and a language model, he rebuilt her as a digital interlocutor. His son sat down and talked to her for over an hour. He did not recognize a program. He recognized his grandmother.

Every civilization reaches a point where its own efficiency becomes its worst enemy. Food is manufactured to be discarded. Energy is extracted from the earth only to be wasted heating empty buildings. Entire professions exist for no purpose other than to justify the professions that supervise them. The modern economy does not malfunction — it functions exactly as designed, and that is the problem. Previous thinkers proposed revolution, reform, disruption. Every attempt to rebuild the system from within produced the same result: catastrophe. The French Revolution devoured its children.