Well, Manvel is officially entering the AI era… good thing?

The City of Manvel has become the first city in Texas to use AI to help with building and planning reviews.

And I have to say, I’m curious to see how this one goes.

On a personal level, I’ve had to deal with permitting lately, at the county level, and let’s just say… it has been an experience.

One of my biggest frustrations with permitting is that sometimes something doesn’t necessarily make sense in a particular situation, but the rule is the rule, the box has to be checked, and there isn’t always much room for common sense.

So naturally, my first thought was: Wait… aren’t robots really good at following rules to the letter?

We already spend half our lives trying to prove we are not robots: “Please select all the squares containing a traffic light.” Now apparently we’re going to have to convince a robot that our building plans are acceptable too.

To be fair, though, there is one part of this that could be a good thing if that ultimately means permits get issued faster, then I’m all for it.

Because that would actually be an improvement.

I’m not convinced AI would be better. Sometimes, what you need is a human who can look at a situation and say, “Okay, technically the rule says this, but in this particular situation, that makes absolutely no sense.” ( I guess we can say some humans run like robots…).

But if the AI is being used as a tool to help the humans, rather than replacing their judgment, this could be interesting.

I can’t wait to see how it works in practice.

And please reach out to give me some feedback on this 🙂