I live in SF, in a testing neighborhood for Cruise and Waymo. I've ridden in driverless Cruise vehicles more than a few times, and yet I am generally skeptical of self-driving cars' viability. I really think self-driving cars are not a useful proxy for the uses of machine learning with regards to golf course development, because our automobile-focused transportation infrastructure is inherently broken and dangerous, where society seems to care much more about uninterrupted throughput than human lives.
Automatic mowers, for example, could simply be pre-programmed, with fail safes, and wouldn't even need machine learning involved much at all. If it did have ML involved, it would be much more akin to
Andrew Ng's self-driving busses with preassigned routes, than general self driving cars.
Again, I think machine learning applications could assist in development of golf courses throughout all the stages. I just think it's important for folks to remember these things take time, and models are trained to do a specific task. Generalized intelligence is still wildly theoretical.
If I had a few spare million dollars, one application I've had in my head for some time, is to train a model walk through topo maps, and find a piece of land similar enough to Augusta National to create a copy for the masses to be able to play. That's the type of application I think would be useful. Another application would just be having a reasonable, if not genius, artificial agronomist to chat with.
Artistic layouts and subtle strategic thought I don't think is something we should be worried about just yet. The types of games that algo's can play are all perfect information games (Go, Chess, etc., though I've heard it played Diplomacy well, but I'm skeptical), and all the artistic creations currently offered do still lack a lot of subtleties (see: it can't draw hands) that are exactly what GCA fans are looking for. I just think it's easy to imagine a fantastical AI future, but I see a lot of speculation with regards to ML that sounds a lot like the flying cars we were promised in my youth, with no clear path from the tech that exists now to get there.