Dear Diary,
I’m sitting near the edge of a cliff. There are no sounds of humanity except my own breathing and the sound of the tip of this pen sliding over the paper.
As a habitual urbanite the change in soundscape is taking some getting used to! It always does when I come away from the city for one of these. The previous generation would probably have called it a “digital detox”. Before that people have gone out into the world for all kinds of reasons; Thoreau, Walkabout, enlightenment, self-discovery. My motivation isn’t nearly so highbrow — every so often I like to get away on my own, just to see if my sanity can stand time without distractions. If I listen to the voices in my head are they saying anything good?
I’ve just come back from a trip to San Francisco. A big meeting with SpaceX about our role in their new off-world programme. Their asteroid mining programme has eaten most of the smaller asteroids in the asteroid belt. Everything under a kilometre in diameter has been turned them into raw materials. Their plan now is to hollow out the big ones and make them into habitats. Our experience in virtual-testing appeals to them. They want to be confident that things are going to work when they get people there.
For the first time since the recession things really are out of this world! Things weren’t looking so promising not too long ago.
For the first time since the recession things really are out of this world!
It’s been quite a ride. I’m not sure I completely understand how we got here. I guess that since I’m out here explicitly to think, if I try to summarise our recent history perhaps it’ll make a bit more sense.
In hindsight all the pieces were on the board, they were just waiting for the big move to be played. Some kind of catalyst that would allow them to react and release all their potential. The 2018 recession was that catalyst.
The invention of robust quantum computers caused the 2018 recession. Quantum computers are able to ‘know’ all the possible answers to a question. Scientists found a way to scale them up from theoretical toys to viable machines far sooner than anyone expected. This had two main effects.
Until then computer power was governed by Moore’s law (the prediction from 1965 that computers would get twice as powerful every 18 months). The familiar doubling stopped and suddenly jumped by a factor of over 1000. Skipping 20 years of progress in a matter of months.
The second effect was far more disruptive. The system of encryption that the entire global economy was based on stopped working. It was no more effective than a polite sign saying “keep out”! Overnight the banks shut all electronic channels. What had been started by opal and PayWave had, by 2018, evolved into a cashless society. Children paid for trinkets at school fetes with their… Wait, what did we call them back then? I guess we still called them ‘phones’. Although telephoning was already a tertiary function at best. Physical money was just for criminals, geriatrics and collectors.
This reliance on virtual money meant that stock markets stopped. Nobody could transact for even simple things like groceries. There just wasn’t enough cash in circulation to fall back onto.
The recession was short but brutal. It seemed as if the increasing speed of everything applied even to economic disruption and recovery. The big technology companies had contingency plans and kept working with the new processing power bounty. Everyone else was bartering for rice. In an incredibly short time they released a new class of specific AI. By the time many professions got back to work their industry was obsolete. Actuaries and many other respectable jobs went the way of blacksmiths, coopers and threshers. It was all the disruptive power of the industrial revolution condensed from half a century to a matter of months.
Architecture was in a pretty bad way after the turn. ‘Design’, as its adherents liked to think of it, had escaped the laser focus of the AIs’ attention, but a huge proportion of the traditional clients that they worked for had just ceased to exist. However the means by which buildings were procured had succumbed to AI manipulation. Some ex-Cisco people had hired a dozen dull, but pragmatic (and unemployed) architects to help them develop a system. By parsing huge numbers of digital planning applications the AI was able to put together a solution that ‘satisficed’ the clients. It couldn’t ever advance the state of the art, but it was able to copy and paste from existing work until things looked good enough.
Clients had a hard time making the case for an architect when they could get something “ok” for next to nothing.
Clients had a hard time making the case for an architect when they could get something “ok” for next to nothing. The architects also missed the growth of NTRal builders. Nonhuman Trades Robots meant big changes in the way buildings were actually put together.
It wasn’t only disaster that sprang from the recession. The turmoil unleashed by so many businesses being unable to trade drove rents to zero. Landlords realised that they could either expend effort on kicking people out, or just hope that things would bounce back and they’d have readymade tenants.
Architects had traditionally been pretty good tenants so they got a good deal on their rent-free space. With no cash flow they offered a similar deal to their staff: Stay and work out what our future is in the hope of being a part of it, or go and do something else. It was a tough call for a lot of people. The pressures of feeding families and staying housed weighed heavily on everyone. Even given the constraints of reality a surprisingly large contingent stayed on. Something to do with their identity being so intermingled with their profession.
The first order of business was to make an explicit case for the value of employing architectural services. This was considered ‘self-evident’ during the time that the title had been protected by various royal charters. Once cut and paste buildings were covered by the same charters, merely being biological wasn’t convincing enough. The separation of ‘institute’ and ‘board’ in many countries really helped. The institutes serving as conduits for conversation about architects explicit value offering.
The rise of virtual reality meant that people expected much more from their immersive environments … people were really in the adventure.
To make some income from our spatial skills we moved into computer game design. It turns out that many of their issues paralleled our own. The rise of virtual reality meant that people expected much more from their immersive environments. People weren’t satisfied with cereal boxes with textures pasted on anymore. Now people were really in the adventure. The magic of walking through the haunted house or enchanted forest needed to be as much of a draw as the monsters or puzzles. Traditional game design studios turned to us to craft their spaces in a more nuanced way.
When working with games developers we saw firsthand how useful it was to have a broadly skilled team. The first project we worked on was a murder mystery on a walking city. The graphic style was totally Archigram so we were all right at home. It wasn’t just nerds and architects though. Their way of working made sure that the team was generalist. There were writers who made all the storylines work seamlessly, psychologists who made sure that the experiences were amplified as much as possible by pulling our primal levers. They even had an antique dealer who made sure that our furniture specs weren’t anachronistic and that the cupboards were stocked with the right sorts of things.
We brought this diversification back with us. Now (in the present) we’ve got about 40% architects on our teams. Graphic designers, anthropologists, animators, business strategists, programmers, simulation specialists, the teams form around whatever we’re working on. I’m getting ahead of myself; giving the game away that everything turns out well in the end. Back to how we got here.
The legacy of Despicable Me was still going strong. One of its spin offs was a game where the goal was to direct minions to do things that contributed to an ultimate goal. I guess it was in the grand tradition of lemmings. It was an amazing success! People loved the sense of agency it gave them — being able to boss something around. The game’s open architecture welcomed user contributed content. One of the most important being new behaviours for the minions. Before long plugins were available to allow people to do ‘real’ things. Replicating the functionality of spreadsheets and eventually someone made an interface layer to Revit.
They could answer these sorts of questions in real time as the model reconfigured.
Wearing a VR mask and being a minion-master didn’t really change the way people did architectural design. What it did do was to change the team make up dramatically. All the AI that was developed for the cut and paste buildings got embedded in Revit. It was trivial to make sure that your detailing was compliant with all the specs. Buildings are now designed with an army of minions ready to do the godlike genius’s bidding. That left nothing to do for people who were those minions. Of course that’s not really what happens! So much of ‘the old ways’ was coordination and documentation. Minion-cad allowed all the people who mattered to get together in a virtual world. They could experiment with the design; making bold moves with the wave of a hand. “What if we tried it with louvers all down the facade? How about just half as many?” They could answer these sorts of questions in real time as the model reconfigured. Now we design buildings over roughly the same timeframe but the process is very different.
During the ‘lean times’ (as we, the survivors, like to call them) we founded the Building Design Open Source Alliance (BDOSA). Its mandate was to share and bootstrap the AI that was built into Revit. This is a bit technical, but we made sure that BDOSA license worked for us. We shared the things we made and improved through a license written with great care. It meant that you could only use the assets if you licensed your work under the same permissive license. The cut and paste builders missed out because they were closed. This meant that when Minion-cad came out we were able to use a much richer set of details and standards than the closed source world. To a 2030 person that seems totally obvious, but it was close to heresy in 2015!
I said that we were able to design buildings like gods, manipulating the virtual world at the speed of thought. To begin with we thought that this would make it possible to get to the end point much faster. We were wrong; the goal posts had shifted. Just doing what we did before but faster wasn’t enough to outshine the cut and paste building enough to justify our fees.
We want to really understand human responses. That kind of testing is really hard, but it delivers incredible results.
With the new expertise that our much broader skill base brought, and the things we learned from the games industry we were able to spend the time that we gained from reducing documentation and coordination on running experiments. We now run lots of simulations on every building. Most of these run at super-high-speed with minions living and working a few thousand times faster than real time. We can do things like evacuation drills easily. General things like how much walking each person needs to do in their day take a bit longer. Once we’re really happy with these sorts of things (which usually takes a couple of weeks) we move on to testing with real people. We get people in immersive environments to be in the space for long periods of time. Sometimes this can be two weeks in one go. We want to really understand human responses. That kind of testing is really hard, but it delivers incredible results.
People like being in VR spaces so much that we actually do quite a lot of work for companies that sell meetings. People want to meet in really inspiring spaces. We design them, but none of them will ever be built. Those projects really never end. We are constantly learning how to optimise them for different physiological responses. You want more focus? No problem! Greater creativity? You got it. The psychologists on the team love this. Turns out that people are more creative if they are a bit frightened (we get this mainly from vertigo) and people tend to be more focused in submarines!
We have been really busy recently. Our cities are remodelling pretty radically. People don’t ‘go to work’ anymore; they go to meet other people and explore their ideas with them. Maybe soon the VR will be good enough to make colocation unnecessary, but I think that’s a way off. When people do go to meet they go by driverless car. The buildings are emptier and so are the roads. Modifying the mix of usage so that it’s mostly residential is keeping us really busy. It’s going to be lovely; most roads are going to end up as parks!
It’s a whole new typology, grassy streets with fruit trees and birds. Coming full circle and putting us into a state of nature much closer to where I am now than we’ve been for a millennium.
