It is 2050, and despite improving vaccines and treatments, the pandemic which started with Covid-19 in 2020 continues to exert a significant impact on the world in terms of deaths, hospitalizations, and general economic and social disruption. Everyone has lost relatives, friends, neighbours and colleagues of all ages to this horrid disease. Partly as a consequence surveys around the world have consistently shown an increased appreciation of the value of human life over the intervening period.

Given this ‘safer society’ paradigm, the legal judgement of the Supreme Court on 17 May 2029 that led to a fundamental rethink of how both vehicles and the streets they operated in were designed was perhaps unsurprising. Fleming versus Universal Motor Company and the Borough of Northwark established that vehicle manufacturers and infrastructure providers were each partially liable for any person(s) being injured or killed as a result of collisions involving their vehicles/road infrastructure, because in most cases they had not paid sufficient attention to protecting vulnerable road users, who had a human right to be as safe as reasonably was possible when using the road. At the same time, there was a realization that guaranteeing 100 per cent safety from autonomous vehicles was proving more difficult than expected, unless the promised efficiency gains across the network were severely compromised as a result. Hence in short order, hard road and footway surfaces were replaced with softer and more forgiving infrastructure in neighbourhoods around the country, while much lighter and slower vehicles began to supplant the overly heavy, unyielding and speeding vehicles of the early 21st century.

Societies around the world had forever suffered hunger, poverty, poor water quality, sickness and traffic congestion. But from 2025, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) made real inroads to addressing these and by 2050 it seemed impossible to imagine just how we had lived without using these Artificial Intelligence Decision making tools – or AIDs.

Romance is not dead

Rosie Green was in shock. Prepping the latest press release for Lovestuck, the 56-year-old senior media officer for the dating AID's holding company G(r)eek Enterprises was uncharacteristically at a loss. Lovestuck is built on a lie, she said to herself for the hundredth time since she’d uncovered this fact just an hour ago. And everything I’ve been writing for a decade is a lie. ‘Using only data for choosing a mate-a.’ ‘Let statistical calculation boost your love equation.’ Really? How did they not tell me? Am I complicit though I didn't know? What about my marriage? Stunned by the enormity of it all, she sat still for a moment and pondered what to do.

The problem, she realized, had much to do with the sheer scale of Lovestuck. Quite simply, the relationships of millions of people around the world would be at risk, maybe even her own. Almost half of all couples in new romantic relationships in Greater London, for instance, had been matched through the Lovestuck system – resulting in 20,000 weddings a year – and with a five-year ‘still together’ rate of over 80 per cent it was easy to see why.

While the L-system approach introduced in the previous chapter exhibits potential for topology optimization applications, the modeling power of the turtle graphics interpretation is severely limited due to its reliance on limited parameters and its inability to guarantee the deliberate formation of load paths. Based on these characteristics, this chapter introduces a graph-based interpretation approach known as Spatial Interpretation for the Development of Reconfigurable Structures (SPIDRS) that uses principles of graph theory to allow an edge-constructing agent to introduce deliberate topological modifications. Furthermore, SPIDRS operates using instructions generated by a parametric L-system, which enhances modeling power and affords greater design freedom. This approach can also be extended to consider a three-dimensional structural design domain. It will be demonstrated that this interpretation approach results in configurations comparable to known optimal/ideal solutions as well as those found using conventional topology optimization methods, especially when coupled with a sizing optimization scheme to determine optimal structural member thicknesses.

Even in retrospect, it was impossible to pinpoint exactly when governments and big business had begun to lose their authority. Perhaps it was during the response to successive Covid pandemics in 2020– 30, when millions of people died due to government incompetence, the greed of large pharmaceutical companies not distributing vaccines to lower-income countries and the irresponsibility of social media giants not clamping down on fake news about vaccines? Or perhaps it was later when faced with war in Eastern Europe; the need to act on climate change; the disastrous introduction of fully autonomous vehicles; episode after episode of people's personal data being compromised; the continuous corruption scandals; or actually any number of other crises during the resultant two-decades-long economic depression? But whatever the reason, in some countries by 2040 it was clear that the cumulative erosion of power had by imperceptibly small steps led to a situation where real influence no longer resided with nation-states, city governments or multi-national corporate companies. Instead, it was often very local communities who wielded power – some responsibly, some less so.

In those places, this change saw the effective abandonment of the connected world, with the internet, cross-border travel and international supply chains all becoming much less significant. Meanwhile, the only real public sector legacy was hugely expanded roadway systems – the result of massive national infrastructure investment progammes intended to re-energize economies across the developed world. Unfortunately, this only succeeded in wiping out rural environments, worsening traffic congestion and air quality, killing off public transport and decimating urban centres.