NO GOALS were established at initiation of this planning project for the parking lot at the south end of this site, but goals did emerge for it that not only provided solutions to problems uncovered elsewhere on the site but then established problems to solve here. (Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Master Plan, Oceanside, CA 2020-22)
There is no such thing as prodigy in architecture as there is, say, in music. You will not find a child architect. There is too much experience to be had, too much to know. The intelligence required to master our discipline is the kind of intelligence with which we know not one thing well but a little about a lot of things. We are generalists and our intelligence is general.
COMPUTER POWERED ACTUATOR DRIVEN WALKING SYSTEMS such ASIMO the robot from South Korea consume sixteen times the energy required of wild passive-dynamic walking systems such as humans and are in this respect sixteen times stupider than humans (ASIMO’s energy required to move a unit weight over a unit distance or “cost of transport” equals 3.2, whereas a human’s equal 0.2.
PASSIVE DYNAMIC WALKING SYSTEMS such as those first developed by Tad McGeer in the 1990s and others being developed (by, for example, engineers Collins and Ruina at Cornell University and Wisse at Delf University of Technology) emulate humans in the way they employ the dynamics of limbs and joints in the context of an environment of gravity and walking surfaces (See “A Three-Dimensional Passive-Dynamic Walking Robot with Two Legs and Knees” by Collins, Wisse and Ruina, in the International Journal of Robotics Research, July 2001)
Our intelligence derives from lived real-world experience, that is, direct and mediated experience in contact with the world around us—people and place, art, and nature. We experience the world first-hand through our practice. We try things, fail, and try again. We also imitate and emulate our peers and our predecessors. We experience the world second-hand through their histories, traditions, mistakes, and successes.
THE INTELLIGENCE IS IN THE GEOMETRY of the complex interplay between agent and environment in passive dynamic walking systems that maximize mobility while minimizing energy expended.
WALKING TOYS were first conceived by an American inventor in the 19th century whose goal was to create the illusion of an animate creature, what we might now call a robot. These toys are passive dynamic walking systems and the illusion works because of our insatiable appetite for anthropomorphizing. (G.T Fallis Patent, 1888)
There are core things to know and skills to have, chief among them the ability to draw and make models. We learn to “read” drawings and models that are abstractions of three-dimensional configurations of the physical world. We deploy mathematics (geometry, calculus), science (physics, thermodynamics), statistics (demographic, economic) and law (contracts, law and regulations).
THE BIG GUY IN THE SKY sometimes referred to as “God” does not exist (meaning the person not God) just as Adam and Eve weren’t two people in a garden tempted by a snake. Instead, they are personifications of impossible-to- describe properties of consciousness and our experiences of it. (Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Rome, Italy)
WE ANTHROPOMORPHIZE EVERYTHING as anyone who has ever given their car a nickname or watched a Disney or Pixar animation knows. (“Beauty and the Beast”, Disney, 1991 above; “Cars”, Pixar, 2006 below)
WE ANTHROPOMORHIZE COMPUTERS which in the movies are alive, but of course only in the movies (“2001 Space Odyssey” 1968 above; “Her”, 2014 below)
We are partly psychologists and sociologists (and therapists). We must know how to present to, hear from and “read” individuals and a room full of individuals, those who are our partners, interlocutors, and challengers in the effort to make something. We must know how to navigate and negotiate often conflicting, even contradictory objectives and goals. We must cultivate empathy. How else are we to know what people want? Or how are we to communicate sometimes abstract and difficult-to-describe concepts about which we think every day to people who do not?
PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS have through their own magical thinking convinced themselves that computers will, like Frankenstein’s monster come alive, a thought you could only ever have if unschooled in real-life experiences, uninitiated in the mysteries of making something and oblivious of material limitation. (Daniel Dennett, above left; Nick Bostrom, below left; Hollywood zombie, above right; You-know-who, below right)
THE REAL MONSTERS TO FEAR are ourselves-- we who invent tools, then misuse and abuse them.
We must cultivate what psychologists call “situational awareness”, meaning not just knowing how to read the room but also how to assess the prospects that any proposition--planning, programming, design or otherwise--will or will not prevail within the webs of relationships that are communities, their cultures, and geographies. This takes experience and experience takes time.
FORGET MACHINES no human possesses unlimited general intelligence. Einstein may have been brilliant as a scientist, but have we ever heard that he was also a brilliant musician?
As architects we know that there are so many kinds of things to experience, to know, and to act upon, sometimes so ineffable, so resistant to representation by words, numbers, or even pictures that it will never be possible to write algorithms for machines or gather enough data to train them on that will ever capture all of what we know—maybe in fragments, but never entirely or even generally.
NO METAPHYSICS NECESSARY, when science and logic alone should convince even the most deluded of philosophers that their fears are unfounded
We know from evolutionary science and neuroscience that the brain, the parts we call “old” such as the cerebellum and those we call “new” such as the neocortex evolved over millions if not billions of years, meaning over all those years of lived real-world experience. Neither part is more nor less human than the other, they are in constant communication and interaction with each other, as well as our bodies, and our environment—all of which adds up to those complex apparatuses that neuroscientists call our minds.
MILLIONS IF NOT BILLIONS OF YEARS OF LIVED EXPERIENCE within a physical environment have bequeathed to us a mind partly instantiated within a brain the complexity of which we will forever learn more about and never know enough
As architects, the efforts of our minds are informed by logic but not entirely—even though in retrospect the outcome may appear (or be made to appear) entirely logical. We are instead informed by the interplay of intuition (direct cognition rooted in in the old brain) and logic (mediated cognition rooted in the new brain) and in an iterative process we may never succeed to fully articulate.
THE PLASTICITY OF OUR MINDS and their incessant exploration and exploitation of the physical world in which we find ourselves cannot be replicated by algorithms or neural networks.
As architects the complexity of the open ended range of both explicit and implicit variables at play requires more often than not that we evaluate promising outcomes based on what “looks” or “feels” right. In other words, we employ aesthetic intelligence, meaning intelligence that puts to work our minds—our whole brains, our bodies (hands, eyes, gut, and heart) and our environment (physical, social, and otherwise).
THAT WE ARE MORE AND LESS THAN LOGIC MACHINES has been amply demonstrated by 5,000 years of lived human experience and more recently by Nobel laureates such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
ALGORITHMS AND NEURAL NETWORKS may not yield the general intelligence we are after, but some AI researchers believe that this does not mean that machines with general intelligence are impossible-- only that we have yet to find the right techniques to coax it out of them.
REVERSE ENGINEERING THE BRAIN is one of those techniques that have shown promise in developing at least a more general, less rigid form of machine intelligence than what algorithms and neural networks have conjured, although most of this research is centered on only certain parts of the brain such as, in the work of UC Berkeley brain researcher Jeff Hawkins, the neocortex. As a result, they have already limited the generality of the intelligence they seek to generate.
Then there is this: creativity. What is it? Is it imagination, open-mindedness, flexibility of mind, insight, discernment, wisdom? We seem to agree that in the pursuit of science and art creativity is indispensable. But creation is not possible without first having the desire to create and then a goal. And yet, in creative pursuits the goals are never entirely clear—neither from the outset nor ever (as they are in games like Jeopardy or Go or the SATs or the Bar Exam). Part of the art in what we do is to first identify then navigate constantly changing goals. We create problems as much as we create solutions.
NON SYMPOLIC COMMUNICATION, meaning concrete, direct and unmediated by words and numbers, such as that which animals especially smart ones like octopuses employ may as scientists such as Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts believe provide clues to the next stage in the evolution of AI.
VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY projects may hold promise for a kind of AI that would be useful in the arts and sciences—we can imagine for example that it may have some utility for architects in visualizing and presenting interventions within the built environment in. (AR projects by artist Nancy Baker Cahill)
Traditional symbolic and more recent neural network AIs get their goals—their problems to solve—from people in the form of computer codes, algorithms, data, letters, numbers, and pictures. But how will a computer, especially one that’s a black box that’s instructed by symbols and data with no lived real-world experience or desire of its own ever come up with its own goals? What makes us think that a Frankensteined code crunching data masher with a few appendages and no lived real-world experience—evolutionary, historical, or personal-—will ever, except to the extent that we allow it to fool us, suddenly spring to life or create anything on its own? These machines are tools, maybe useful ones we can choose to use or abuse. But machines don’t live or create, people do.
THE COMPLEXITY OF THE DESIGN PROCESS involves not just drawing and modeling, calculating, and writing but also experiences of and interactions with the physical and social worlds in which we live—a process that cannot take place in nanoseconds or within a black box. (Oceanside Beachfront Redevelopment Master Plan, Oceanside, Ca 2020-22)