Interesting read however, I question (and it is mentioned in the article) the ability of AI to understand and employ the nuances of design as it relates to asthetics. I am not saying it isn’t possible. Simply that a lot of AI‘s ability is making decisions from historical information. I feel that innovative creativity is more about flying in the face of historical trends and not replicating them in a different way. Lipstick on a pig and all…

By Martyn Day – As a society, living in a technological age, we have become incredibly used to rapid change. Sometimes it feels like the one constant we can rely on is that everything will change. For millennia humankind lived in caves, scrawling drawings on the walls. The Stone Age was 2.5 million years long, then came the Bronze Age and, with it, urbanization, which lasted 1,500 years. The first Industrial Revolution lasted just 80 years (1760 – 1840). Before we reached our current, digital age, the Wright Brothers perfected powered flight and just 66 years later, our species had escaped Earth’s gravity, traversed the vacuum of space and landed on the moon. We are making advances in ever shorter timeframes and have industrialized innovation through the development of ever-smarter tools.

The next revolution is already here but, as the saying goes, it will not be evenly distributed. At the moment, many aspects of our working lives are still going through digital transformation. Everything is becoming data and the more that becomes centralised, the more insights it enables, offering a greater opportunity for knowledge processing.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have gone from science fiction to science fact and are rapidly being used by increasing numbers of industries to improve productivity, knowledge capture and in the creation of expert systems. Businesses will need to transform as quickly as these technologies are deployed as they will bring structural and business model changes at rates which we have not yet truly anticipated.

In the last few months, I’ve seen demonstrations of design technology currently in development that will, at the very least, automate labour intensive detail tasks and perhaps greatly lessen the need for architects on certain projects. Read On: