Technology and Nature
This letter is an introduction to an architect’s relationship with technology. I hope it works for you.
Architecture is not technology, nor is it the natural environment. Technology is tools to do something. Building (technology), environmental planning (technology), the financial means (technology), and design as a process are tools for developing our environment. Technology excludes the fullness of nature. Nature is not technology or systems.
The environment is not just materials. It has life and a raison d'etré beyond its physical materiality. The environment is alive as a biosphere. It has many more and less subtle strata of life that have been referred to by perceptive people over millennia. All of this has a raison d'etré and we will assume that people and humanity have a raison d'etré beyond our life too. (I will introduce the theme of spirituality in an upcoming post.) When we presence architecture something in the environment allows us to touch this potential, conscious or not, cognized or not.
We might see technology in light of making our environments as two interacting flows of power. One is building technology and the other is computing. The latter is crowned by the generative AI entities that are now being released. These fit within the wider field of Artificial Intelligence, defined as machines emulating how people act including how we reason, give value, generalize, and learn. Generative AI using Large Language Models are a specific mode of AI. These are not currently enabled to evolve themselves. Each model, such as ChatGPT, needs to be first upgraded and then trained before it is used.
Generative AI is different from Generative Design, which includes ‘parametric design’. I will engage the difference in light of presencing architecture in a future post.
Source: Slide for AIAU Seminar. Fundamentals of AI for Designers. Tonya Custis PhD, Director Research AI, AutoDesk.
Architects can use AI to research materials and components like never before. This is coming to CAD and BIM in a big way, making the complexity of it more accessible and further integrating the processes involved in realizing projects. Refining a file and making it perfect, finding errors of entry and maintenance, and also enhancing component selection and design efficiencies will soon be a short task as agents are evolved.
Meaningful images can be generated based on recombining existing knowledge and curating the results. The entire history of humanity and the whole world and the long evolution up to this time are inherent in our records and the environments that we make. LLM generative AI taps into this, using all of life travelled by us as would anyone who builds on their most inspiring or beloved antecedents. It can generate images, but also any scenario using statistics and other data for models.
The Renaissance in Corten Steel by Mohammad Qasim Iqbal using Midjourney early in 2023. Zooming in, it is painterly. Even the people become painterly impressions at a resolution far above pixel scale.
Dall-e, Midjourney, (multi-modal) Genesis/Bard, and more, can give us many uncanny and unexpected but plausible visions. These touch us without a tectonic reality. It is 'true' because we feel something through, for example, Mohammad Qasim Iqbal's curation. They point toward experiences like architecture in a pure way that is also wrong; without engagement with a living environment. They vanish into painterly strokes well before the pixels scale. Does architecture presence when we enter his images with our awareness? If so, what is the environment that they presence in? Perhaps we can feel how architecture might be happening within us. It is a pure experiment since they are not any place.
The above image appears very lively, but it is without any life relationships to context and nature. There is an appeal to our minds. Such generated images are the opposite of uninspired spiritless environments. But both are on the same continuum. Both are essentially technological. Mass housing in uninspired suburbs or blocks of the same single family house, or massive blocks of housing such as in former East Berlin or so many places … they oppose Mohammad Qasim Iqbal’s images but both also remain technological in essence. The uncanninesss of those images implies danger.
AI
There is a lot of misunderstanding about how autonomous AI will be and what it can do. It is too easy to underestimate the effects and to overestimate its power independent of human choices.
Nevertheless, many of the people who are positioned as designers, guides and managers for generative AI's development are the most wary and some are fearful of the outcomes. What are the issues?
AI in general is pegged to take work away from people, as is usual for new technology. We treat that kind of loss like an act of nature. Evolution does create obsolescence naturally, but we do not responsibly and compassionately accommodate for human caused changes, and people end up under the bus. But this is not a new threat.
AI can serve human aggression and violence, as have many technologies.
AI will change the direction of life. But we have already experienced that technology changes the course of our lives.
AI will transform the world to its image, taking away 'our' world from us. The danger is that we trend sharper toward a world run by technologically generated 'ideas' of what is ‘good’ that form an authority proxy for humanity.
We still suppose that technology and science will do what is right for humans, as long as they are designed properly, since we made those for our purposes and betterment.1 If AI takes away the world we know, it is not because AI is different from Modern Machine Ages technology, but that the targeted resource will be the anthroposphere. Even that is a matter of degree, rather than a new approach. We have already long been exploiting each other. We will continue to see a great deal of harm being done to each other, as well as the mishandling of Nature, if we can divide humanity from Nature at all.
No one is arguing that any AI will help humanity be morally better and more compassionate. Generative AI is trained by the data generated by humanity and it absorbs humanity's self-harming character. The release of contemporary Generative AI to the public is to some degree dependent upon fencing it to coral its nasty tendencies. The danger is that an AI juggernaut facilitates more intensity to what we have been doing to the earth and each other.
Products that cause harm proliferate due to accepted financial and economic limitations on defining and documenting harm. This behavior is the ground of how capital is channeled into developing all technology. Most people seem to agree that the leadership issue at OpenAI in November 2023 was a battle over a higher standard of care as primary accountability for doing 'good' vs. accountability to investors. Accountability for human welfare lost a battle at OpenAI. The race to market is accelerated.
War
Over 100 years after WWI, which got mired in long fronts of inch-by-inch trench warfare, such a stalemate is happening at the Ukraine–Russia front again, even after a century of intense development of technology of warfare. There is a ‘natural’ tendency to not use the more extreme weapons and technology of war that could destroy tens of thousands of troops in days, on which we have spent billions. I write ‘natural’ because the danger of these weapons is innate. I would hope that is because our humanity, such as it is, still holds on to our conscience somewhat and we stay away from migrating to greater violence.
In such an extreme example this humane factor is clear. Stepping back from such horror, we can find that limit before which lies all that is right and plausible to a humane person in our other activities. We can examine our systems for harvesting resources such as forestry, mining, and mass production in consumer economies, to find a variety of forms for this transitional space of factors limiting acts of greater dissonance, harm and violence. I would like to point to that space as where architecture's presencing can also be felt. Our vision may be clearer to perceive what we do to our environments as we try to make them more fitting to our purposes if we also feel the pain in the gross example of war.
Hope and Justice
So, we stand with our new weapons ready. How can we define the impulse in ourselves that keeps us from taking that nastier step?
Hope. ... that this thing will end.
Justice. ... that the end scenario is just.
Going to a greater level of violence pushes a just ending further away and hope is devolved to more profoundly awful destruction, which is grim hope indeed, if at all.
There is massive destruction involved in making our environments today as we harvest materials and power without asking the participation of Nature using systems that ignore its life. That is also a battle, but Nature has an approach that does not often take up battle like people do. As long as our technology battles Nature, we will be able reach higher levels of wealth and health by mitigating the damage or at least not taking the next more violent position. Then hope and just or honest solutions are nearer.
That sounds like waffling. It is not only de-escalation, but an art. Architecture is not war-like, it fights in other ways, like Nature. The conscious mind that we all share is a form of Nature, supported by Nature, that includes freedom to choose our actions from a never ending field and that inherently asks that we seek higher value. The art of our dwelling takes place that way. Architecture’s presencing takes place by creating the beautiful relationship with Nature, which includes humanity's role. Hope is present as that feeling that we are in a place that aspires support of a higher quality of human life. That place is just through very subtle human values.
The kind of environments that are remembered across time and cultural spaces as architecture imbibe an immeasurable value and create what may carry infinite value. That value is inherent in everyone. Technology cannot produce it. Architecture is dependent on people this way. It has defied a limit of systemic measure where it presences.
Aspiration
There is no categorical difference between the sphere of AI and the technology that we use today. Technology is triumphing in the space of thinking and parsing recorded knowledge. How is it doing on intellect, feeling, intuition, not to mention honesty and the entire spectrum around belief, faith, intentionality and motivation? Where are aspiration, love and compassion in LLM Generative AI training? I suspect that, like most of us, most of the scientists and technologists working on AI have personal issues with the latter themselves. Most of us have difficulty discussing these issues or integrating them healthfully in our work, leave alone training an AI, if it is possible to train a machine in such things.
Pointing AI entities to the human record to train them to figure out how to 'answer' makes them dangerous. We need to fence them in. Fences always have limits. We have likely already again wagered against hope and justice with Generative AI as we have been with our technology for quite a while now.
Lack of architecture is dangerous, similar to the danger of a ‘lack’ of Nature in our environment. Technology appropriates beauty and harmony into systems and mechanisms for extracting assets from life. It provides a sign of architecture, thereby concealing it. Lack of architecture in our cultures is the lack of a kind of life; the life of humanity’s consciousness within Nature. The condition of our environments is such that architecture seems like an extra to many people. Does this seem an extreme statement? An analogy is that if we consider taking a day in nature, a hike or going to the park, to be beneficial and rejuvenating, such an excursion clearly provides something that our homes and their context do not. For millennia all beings lived in Nature always. Now it is an extra, outside our life. We have to go elsewhere. Nature is not present in most built contexts. Why? Architecture is also very often not present.
The development of our Modern Machine Ages technology has defined our current cultures. This Office is rooted in the now, in how our profession is organized and its values, within the accelerating environmental and human crisis. Architecture existed before our current technology and it will see its end. Our goal is to evolve an appropriate independence for architecture.
There is are good arguments that Modern Machine Ages technology is essentially harmful because it is disjunct with Nature. I will write about that later. It is a core element of my dissertation, The Goal in Architecture. An summary is published at academia.edu. A relevant section can be found here. A version of that will be uploaded to a repository at the Akademie der bildenden Kunst Wien soon.
Thought provoking and timely.