Thoughts about AI

Off Topic
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What if the human curating the design isn’t a designer?

That’s what IA is about.

We are both portuguese and in here there isn’t a tradition to buy premade plans for building houses. In the US, i.e. there is. People are buying design that is premade and that they think it’s appropriate for them.

Don’t you think they will be able to ask for a design made by IA, have it built in a very small amount of time, see if they like it, trust that it complies with regulations, purchase it and give some building teams to build it?

Will IA need to have that design premade or will it be able to make it asap?

And once that is possible for small projects, how long will it take to develop IA for bigger ones?

IA is at a point where it can be used to do parts of the whole architectural workflow, but in other design disciplines, it is being used for the full workflow already.

What I think about IA is that it will be an option and it will be up to us to fight for relevance so we are also an option. It’s either do that or be out of business and the more standard our approach the closer we are to irrelevance.

Not at first. At first some collaborators work will be in danger, after a while a lot of the collaborators work will be in danger, and at some point most design practices will be endangered.
It won’t happen now, probably not in a couple of years, but it will happen and, no matter what we convince ourselves of, I don’t think we will be ready for it.

I wonder if discussing lines and vector hatches is a discussion for our job’s relevance. I like discussing anything nonetheless.

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That´s something that we can´t know right now, probably some people will choose to save some money by letting an AI design their home, but I´m sure that it won´t be as good as design made by a good architect. AI just takes all the information available about houses design and could probably make a design that on paper looks great, but it skips the human part, where the designer meets the client, gets to know every detail of their dream house, all the needs that must be supplied, and find the best solution for that specific client, also advice the client and explain why some of their ideas aren´t the best in some cases. That is something that an AI can´t do, they just follow some prompts but they don´t know the real needs of the clients, or the topography, at least for now, who knows if some day AI´s will be able to think as human architect, if that day comesand I´m still alive, I´ll have find another way to bring the bread for my family.

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Well, for the look of things:

Good architects are a rare commodity already.

AI is already giving advice to a lot of people and creating images, videos, songs and graphic design that people already love.

In architectural applications AI is being explored to do a lot of things and can do it better and better. It started being explored for that in a couple of years maybe a vit more.

With this development speed…

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And there lies the predicament of the modern human. We have been conditioned to hold the value of money above all else. The sacrifice of others, their skills & crafts to save a few $$s is taking us ever further into a world of division.

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I’m all for arts and crafts, but money is an essential technology that allows us to evaluate our work and the work of others and prioritize choices.

People have to deal with it because they have many needs. If those needs are fulfilled with less money they will be able to fulfil more needs.

We can discuss what needs should people choose from and if they are choosing needs over desires, but skills and crafts have long changed from being needed, to becoming desire, because of industrialization. You simply cannot ask someone to choose between having their kids healthy, well nourished, warmly dressed, have a house, having books, doing sports, having good education and still buy a stool for 4x more the price they can buy from ikea.

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Perhaps I presented an overly simplistic position, but certainly in the UK you can see the impact of people seeing things cheaper on Amazon, they buy online and the local shops close as a consequence. You then hear comments like “We don’t go into town any more because there are no shops, so we buy online”. There is a benefit in having sustainable communities that make everyone happy; they give people purpose beyond unemployed consumerism. The chase for growth and capitalism is in my personal opinion misguided, it will fuel the drive for AI and apply a self-inflicted wound on the future of humanity as the division between rich and poor grows.

Sorry, this is probably a bit heavy and OT from the opening post, but in someways it is very relevant to our growing obsession with AI that will lead to human redundancy.

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I’m with you.

Imagine if magically we had the billions of €£$ the tech bros are throwing at AI available for human education - proper child care options for working parents, proper health care both mental and physical, proper support within our communities for educating and raising empathetic, smart, caring fellow humans, proper funding for lunches at school so kids don’t have to worry about where their next meal comes from, a sane way to fund college education… and on and on.

We have billions to be thrown at AI but we never have money for the school budget, for health care, for mental health, for supporting working parents…

We can’t even get human education done right - I can’t imagine that us training machines is going to end well.

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This topic should be split by an higher power.

I don’t think it’s either one or the other. You can have AI and more arts and crafts, more communities and more education and culture.

AI is about productivity: having the greatest outcome with minimum effort. Investing in that will always allow for more people to have free time to do better things and acquire better interests. It will also allow a more frivolous life, but there is choice.

Before renaissance, liberalism, capitalism and the industrial revolution, how many people had free weekends, how many people knew how to read, how healthy was the population?

Society is still unfair and should always improve but it has been improving for more societies in the world and Capitalism is the driver. The search for meaning and purpose is not equal to the search for capital, but if you don’t have the means to be confortable, safe and healthy, you cannot pursue a meaningul life. For all it’s imperfection and shortcomings, the places you have more choice, if you want to acquire this meaningful life, are capitalist societies.

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I hopefully moved the right set of posts.

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meanwhile, microsoft is getting worried it’s making us stupid

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What Microsoft is probably worried about, is how it’s getting left behind…

Imho, what’s making us stupid is endless stream vs reading thinking and creating, as well as less time spent outdoors and on face to face relations vs social media.

I talk about myself here, not pointing fingers.

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so, if the company that collaborates with these studies is not leading in the field, then they are biaised because they fear being left behind.
on the other hand, leading companies won’t run the same studies and/or publish them because they could tarnish the field they’re competing in.
okay :upside_down_face: :wink:

Here in france, since you don’t need an architect for a house below 150m2 (most of them), a vast majority of houses are “designed” by non architects. ask any of these homeowner why they didn’t use an architect, money will be a frequent answer.

so when you say “some people”… it’s most. most people. Some will still use architects because they understand the value they bring, the same way some people still buy designer or bespoke furnitures. I’d personally like to, but because of inflation and hyperinflation, I’ll stick with IKEA instead.
lower prices will drive people to it, regardless of how the prices are lowered.

AI tools are, after all, the brainchildrens of techbros. the pure product of the hustle culture. get rich quicker, produce faster, optimisation and rentability, no matter the human and social cost.

if it was an utopia, all these AI tools would free our time. we’d have more time to go out, paint, dream. But this is not, so we loose our jobs and have to hustle extra hard just to meet ends.

edit : it took me 40 min to write that. I wrote more, I chopped some parts, it helped me structure my thoughts. I would have asked chatgpt to synthesise my first draft. I’m glad I didn’t.
thinking isn’t easy, nor is creating. blindly delegating these things to a machine is like… taking a helicopter to the summit of a mountain because it’s easier than climbing.

that’s just missing the whole point.

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I was just kidding there, but there are studies that show everything you need them to. We have to have an opinion on what is presented to us and think what’s the motivation that might be behind it, the context, the scope, the opportunity. We can also simply believe it or not, or go dive deep in that study ourselves.

I often suspect this kind of studies, especially when they are handy for the specific entity that publishes them.

If they don’t need architects in those cases, why not save the money and the hassle?

So, it’s not that they wouldn’t be better served if they would use one, it’s that most aspects of constructing simple buildings are already known to so many people, that using an architect is probably over the top.

In that context, architects can either move on, redefine their roll and address more complex markets where they are still needed, or they can enforce themselves in that smaller market where it seems people don’t want to use their services.

Maybe AI could be an upgrade in that niche?

A robot with an AI brain, can peel the shell of an egg and then peel the skin beneath it. A human will never be able to accomplish that. That skill can save lives on surgery. There is social cost not to develop it.

If you are going to save someone that fell off a cliff on the top of the mountain, you better have the helicopter. If you cannot reach the spot with an helicopter, you better have a human that can climb there, if a human will take too long, that person might die. If we would have a bot with AI that could get there and bring that person down, wouldn’t that be nice?

So, increased productivity is benefitial to society.

We can, of course, bend everything into a positive or negative side but, power in the right hands will do good and in the bad hands will do evil.

We can be afraid of what comes, even if we cannot stop it, or we could try to see the positive side of it, and take advantage of it for good things.

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In data collected by the Economic Policy Institute](Moral policy = good economics: What’s needed to lift up 140 million poor and low-income people further devastated by the pandemic | Economic Policy Institute), the growth in productivity has more than doubled that of hourly compensation for U.S. workers since 1948. With net productivity in the country growing by roughly 253 percent in the last seven decades, hourly compensation has increased by just 116 percent.

Between 1948-1979, the percent growth in productivity and wages were relatively similar, with an increase of 108 percent and 93 percent, respectively. The growth from 1979-2018, however, has been drastically different. While net productivity has continued to increase by an expected 70 percent, hourly compensation in the country is less than a fifth of that at just 12 percent.

In 1965, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in the United States stood at about 20-to-1, according to a 2015 report by the EPI. But starting in the 1970s up through 2014, “inflation-adjusted CEO compensation increased 997 percent, a rise almost double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.9 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.”

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One can toot ai’s horn but it is not going to solve all the problems of the world. Just think about all the money being thrown at it. Now if that money was put to humanitarian uses…in every country…

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and I suppose that evens out ? every new tech is a pandora’s box. and what they are doing right now it blasting the box open with dynamite.
a few years ago at a conference, a guy was talking about an ai - algorithm (call it what you want) that helped identify pre cancerous tumours in MRI. amazing.
it was later trained to find suitable drone targets with “optimal” results and “acceptable” civies deaths.
Not sure how they feel about the tumours in the current warzones. not sure how I feel.

whenever a new tech arises, you can be sure of two things. some people are going to monetize the ■■■■ out of it regardless of the cost. and some people will find ways to use it to kill. often both at the same time.
embracing the good that might possibly come out of it without facing all the horror already pouring out of the box is… ugh.

sure, an unlimited growth in a limited ecosystem, that works.

no relation, how is the environment collapsing where you are ? here it’s collapsing good. haven’t seen snow in 15years.

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this reminds me a question a teacher asked in physics class back in highschool, to make us understand the concept of scale.

a freezer is cold. a toaster is hot.
if I place a toaster in a freezer who wins ?

well in order for the coils to glow in the toaster, you need 5-600°c or more. the air is 150-200°c inside the toaster.
my freezer is at -20°c

just because there is heat and cold doesn’t mean it balances. same with the good vs bad dichotomy you’re talking about.
and right now, the toaster is at full power.

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There is huge danger in AI and we are well aware of the potential for destruction of anything that can be weaponized and is new, powerful and untammed.

We should tame it as best as we can, but it’s not in our hands, or is it?

It is here, it is going to be developed, it is going to affect our lifes positively and negatively, it’s not going to stop nor belief we have seems to affect what’s happening.

Where it will lead, you can’t say for sure, but from now on, our future will exist with AI…

I’ll tell you what I’m doing:

  • Try to understand it;
  • Try to use it;
  • Aknowledge it’s still not efficient for what I would do with it.
  • Keep an eye on it, so I don’t get out of the train.
  • Take advantage of it when I can, if I can.
  • Try to be positive and do positive things with it.
  • Hope that humanity will be able to deal with it positively too, as it happened with all end of the world tech that poped up until now.
  • Face reality whatever happens and when Terminator kills me and my family try to think on your: “I told you so with a smile!”

Sorry for sounding such an cyinic in this regard, but I’m living in this world, the best I can.

PS/EDIT:

The best we can probably do is focusing in learning all analogic tech we still can, as well as knowledge that is key for surviving as a species, like farming, hunting and dealing with nature… just as a failsafe. It won’t hurt… Even if it wouldn’t help much if it’s striking us with AI accuracy.

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This is absolutely not the place for this but seeing as it has come up. I would love some improvements to LO but AI… not so much

AI is about control of the means of production by fewer and fewer people. So i think we should be very careful about what we wish for.

I personally don’t know what the hurry is with AI given that we haven’t got to grips with the internet yet and all the apparent disinformation and upheaval it has caused and is causing. So brining in AI quickly and thoughtlessly seems dangerous to me.

It is, for instance, no surprise to find tech bro’s suddenly sniffing around the corridors of power and apparently calling the shots. They are fighting for the means of production. After all, who will need elections when we have AI . Elon Musk when asked last April who would be president, responded that it ‘transformers or diffusion’ siting two models for generative AI. That response is pretty telling, especially considering he and his toddler have single handedly made a coup on the white house as everyone silently watches on. He’s fighting for the means of production and by extension the power structures. He is talking about us having an AI president before long ffs.

Sorry to be bleak but unless we change course very quickly I think AI ends in two ways.

First, we descend in to a sort of information dark age where people stay in the current brain fog, unsure of who to believe or what to believe. Huddling behind artificial walls for safety scared of made up ideas that have been designed to divide us and so control. Are we not sort of there already (see Elon Musk above)? who really thinks a transgender bathrooms matter after all. But we all go backwards as more wealth gets gathered to fewer people.

Second, a class conflict… and who knows what direction that goes in. and yes, that is exactly what Karl Marx theorized (but didn’t advocate for). It is a pattern that repeats. and before you call me ridiculous, that is exactly what the chattering classes were saying Moscow in 1917, as they discussed the latest ballet when suddenly the Bolsheviks came for them. The first thing they are doing now, is going after the educated middle classes in government , educational institutions the judiciary or anywhere really, to squash thoughtful dissent . Russia never recovered from that era.

So yes, the fight for the means of production could very easily lead to conflict. Awful, obscene unspeakable conflict. and everyone has apparently forgotten that this has happened before as we rip up NATO and start pointing fingers at wokeness to undermine structures that have kept power honest.

I don’t want either outcome. But I think it is even more inconceivable and unrealistic to imagine an idealistic outcome where we all gamble across green meadows with more money in our pockets doing less work because of AI.

History has been here before. I don’t think we should be waving on AI. I will happily wrestle with LO if it means that these technological advances are implemented very slowly and thoughtfully. but first we need collectively to clear the fog!

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  1. This is not a Layout thread anymore. The conversation has been moved out.

  2. Democratization of AI is there already. It’s becoming widely available, costs are decreasing, major players are shifting and smaller players are popping up. The market is growing and getting stronger. Of course there is still centralization of who develops it and of the tech needed to have it running. But competition will rise there too.

  3. Because of the above, I believe in the idea of not a single AI, but multiple, many, with different purposes. Some of them private, some opensource, all fighting for their part.

  4. USA president won by a huge margin, voters knew the entourage, they are doing exactly what they promised. They have a pragmatic view of the world and it seems US voters believe in it. It’s a strong stance, that has logic from a powerful country, the world must adapt. As an European I aknowledge that Europe has stalled. Fortunately, for europeans and us residents, democracy allows for a peaceful transition of power. If things are not how they want it, it can change in a few years. Europe must change asap.

  5. Territory, people, means of production, resources, military power, tech, ideas and culture are the ultimate dispute matter in the world. That’s why capital makes sense, as it converts everything into an abstraction that can be dealt with rules and as peacefully as possible.

  6. History has been here before, yes. Once tech revolution is in place there’s no stopping it. Sorry but it’s ridiculous to think that it will happen now. We have made a lot of mistakes but we have adapted, by experimenting, learning, embracing the right ideas, changing the bad ones, in a mediation between progressism and consertlvatism and we are better than before.

  7. What makes you think it won’t happen again other than belief?

  8. What makes me think it will happen again other than belief?

AI is about fear and hope, pessimism and optimism, reality will be a lot of things in between and we can’t stop it.

Especially not with LO: it’s too slow to stop anything that’s moving fast.