ConstructionLeon Della BoscaTue 07 Jul 26
Excited, Terrified: Robotics Director Michael Milford on Future Tech
“I’m both incredibly excited by, and absolutely terrified, by AI right now.”
You’d think it safe to assume that Professor Michael Milford, joint director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, would have a comfortable relationship with the technology reshaping the built environment.
But Milford said AI keeps him up at night, “and it also gets me up in the morning, at least from a professional perspective”.
Milford will present a keynote session at Urbanity-26 on the Gold Coast later this month.
His caution around artificial intelligence comes partly from an early lesson in the limits of technological optimism, where touring a commercial building site for the first time left a lasting impression.
“I was blown away by the professionalism and craft that went into managing this incredibly complex and dynamic endeavour,” he told The Urban Developer.
That experience, he said, gave him “a firsthand, visceral understanding of why further innovation in development can be so difficult, despite the long list of technologists spruiking their revolutionary solution”.
“There’s a temptation in technology fields to think that complex, expensive challenges like construction and development can be easily helped by robotics and automation,” Milford said.
“Then reality hits, and everyone realises how incredibly difficult making meaningful tech-related progress is in this area.”
Still, artificial intelligence is central to his outlook on where the sector is heading.
He said the emergence of ChatGPT was the most significant shift of the past five years, adding that it “popularised a momentous change in the technological landscape and for humanity in general”.
“I think we are only just starting to scratch the surface of what that means for all of us into the future,” he said.
Opportunity, he said, lies in applying these tools directly to the built environment.
“There are major opportunities for appropriate and trusted integration of new AI and automation technologies into the built environment, both during construction and in the ongoing monitoring, maintenance and running of those built environments,” Milford said.
“Incrementally introducing it on top of existing workflows and processes has limited returns. Real integration is going to need some substantial, and perhaps uncomfortable, changes in how we do things.”
Driving change of that scale requires a certain kind of leadership, one Milford is still working out for himself. His hardest ongoing decision, he said, is balancing long-term culture against short-term performance.
“Theoretically good culture leads to great performance, but there’s a timescale to that,” he said. “And working on culture is hard, difficult, takes a long time, and has a payoff that usually is measured in years.”
Overall, Milford views robotics and AI as tools with enormous promise, provided the built environment resists the urge to rush their adoption.
He said rushing infrastructure decisions carries risk due to the mismatch between digital rollout speeds and physical construction timeframes.
“As a technologist, I’m all for fast tracking beneficial technologies, [but] I do always caution that in many situations there’s nothing wrong with the much-derided fast follower mindset,” he said.
“Let someone else take some of the risks for you.”
Queensland University of Technology Centre for Robotics joint director Michael Milford will present a keynote session at Urbanity-26, where he’ll unpack how cities will function once robots and AI agents become part of everyday infrastructure and what that means for those who design and deliver them.
