Physical AI × Expanded Humanities for healthier communities

AIXHUMAN is one interdisciplinary group advancing Physical AI × Expanded Humanities—local and global, technical and humanistic, academic and civic. Architects, engineers, biologists, AI researchers, artists, humanists, fabricators, entrepreneurs, students, and community leaders work across disciplinary boundaries to imagine and build more regenerative, equitable, and meaningful cities.

We connect architecture, biology, artificial intelligence, engineering, fabrication, the arts, and humanities. Rather than treating these as separate fields, AIXHUMAN creates a shared environment where knowledge, tools, laboratories, workshops, and ideas can circulate. Research becomes experimentation; experimentation becomes prototypes; and prototypes become tangible interventions in everyday urban life.

At the center is Physical AI: intelligent systems that sense, reason, learn, and act in the material world through robotics, buildings, living materials, infrastructure, mobility, and public space. Alongside it, the Expanded Humanities bring ethics, history, philosophy, art, culture, and critical inquiry into the process. Together, they allow us to ask not only what can we build with AI? but what should we build, for whom, and toward what kind of future?

Community building is therefore as important as technological innovation. Our approach combines seminars, public conversations, shared research, fabrication, material experiments, demonstrations, and working prototypes. We create places where people who might rarely work together can exchange knowledge and collectively address systems of food, water, energy, habitat, mobility, health, care, and public life.

Our group spans NYU Gallatin, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, TED Fellows, Terreform ONE, Lifespan Research Institute, CIV:LAB, and Cooper Union. We work as one community across education, research, technology, design, fabrication, entrepreneurship, culture, and civic life. Physical AI × Expanded Humanities is our common mission and the framework for our shared work.

Ultimately, AIXHUMAN is about more than adapting society to artificial intelligence. It is about building community around a shared physical future—using powerful new technologies while strengthening human agency, ecological regeneration, cultural life, social connection, and our collective capacity to shape the places in which we live.

We measure progress not simply by computational capability, but by healthier environments, useful and repairable technologies, stronger communities, richer public life, and greater human possibility.