For a very long time, the discourse regarding the consequences of the rise of automation and artificial intelligence was all about the substitution of machines to humans for repetitive, low-level tasks and jobs. The new landscape that is emerging reveals a strikingly different situation. Surely, robots will replace labor in many cases — they have already begun to do so in factories and the time is coming when they will multiply on constructions sites — but automation will not stop at the replacement of workers in industries such as automobile or building. With the development of artificial intelligence, it is highly probable that activities of conception, which are still seen as bastions of irreplaceable human ingenuity, will be impacted as well. Moderately intelligent programs are already able to write simple pieces of news for journals and websites. The time will soon come when machines will be able to feed media with more sophisticated content. We must prepare for a world in which artificial intelligence will not only regulate infrastructure operations or financial markets exchanges but also exercise some of humans' core competences.
This presents potentially dramatic consequences in a domain like architecture in which invention is more strictly bound by technical constraints, rules of use and aesthetic conventions — the practical translation of the famous Vitruvian triad, solidity, commodity, beauty — than other fields. These constraints, rules and conventions make it easier to grasp by machine intelligence than less formalized forms of creation. Present-day consolidation of the profession in large to extra-large practices is probably paving the way for a dramatic decrease in employment. Once consolidated in giant practices, architectural design will be easier to automate, just like concentration was one of the prerequisites for the introduction of robots in the automobile industry.
From such a perspective, two questions immediately arise for practitioners, educators and theorists. The first regards the place that human intelligence will keep in a design process largely delegated to machines. The second, less theoretically enthralling but certainly far more reaching in professional terms regards employment. Should one envisage in the future a drastic decrease in the number of architects and consequently in the size of the students in architecture population? Although raising such questions presents a distinctively dystopian flavor, they seem unavoidable given the rapid pace of development of artificial intelligence.
Contrary to what it may seem at first, it is easier to answer the first question than the second. As a starting point, let me note that one of the immediate consequences of the use of computers in architecture has been to smoothen and fluidify the design process, to make it less tedious in material terms and more open to changes in direction. Variations, modifications, alternative solutions have become easier to implement. In such a context, the role of the designer is gradually moving away from the minute adjustments that adaptation and changes required to a more strategic take on what truly matters and should be pursued or preserved whatever the direction taken with the help of the machine.[1] Building Information model increases this move from tactics to strategy — to use a military metaphor. Indeed, it forces designers to rethink the entire range of competences mobilized in a project as well as the system of permissions granted to various collaborators to modify the characteristics of what has been shared with them. At this level too, clear sight is needed. Designers strategy include more than ever organizational skills that may be compared to those of a general deploying his troops and assigning them missions prior to a battle.
Such strategic role is among the prerogatives that the human might very well retain in an environment of intelligent machines. One of the founding reasons for such a claim is that humans will remain unrivaled in determining what truly matters for beings made of flesh and blood. What truly matters: from design and organizational skills, one is led to envisage dimensions such as political and social relevance, and above all meaning. What constitutes a meaningful space for humans? Although it is not fashionable these days to refer to the symbolic dimension of architecture, such a reference could very well emerge as an essential aspect of what will make humans still relevant in a machine-aided and even -guided design process. For sure, machines will always be good at manipulating finite set of forms and symbolic elements such as those that post-modernism used to consider.[2] Organized through a syntax, their combinations are just like any of these formal languages that computers are expert at playing with. But meaning in architecture is not reducible to mere combinations. It unfolds; it is more akin to a phenomenon of emergence than to the formulations obtained with a rigorously defined language. Architectural symbols, true symbols that is, are never static; like ornaments in the Vitruvian tradition, they are becoming symbols rather than being signs in a static fashion.[3] Humans will probably remain better than machines at capturing the elusive mode of existence of the symbolic in architecture.
Now, are we training too many would-be architects that artificial intelligence will replace one day? As I mentioned earlier, this is the hardest challenge, for it entails thinking seriously about the necessary diversification of the modes of practice of architecture. So far, the profession has remained strikingly faithful to the ideal of the architect-designer either running his practice or working in a large office. All over the world, schools of architecture are still training their students almost exclusively from this perspective. In the future, we may have to envisage architectural education as much as a generalist curriculum leading to all sorts of jobs where a keen understanding of the relations between space, society and politics is needed as a training to enter a well-defined professional area. Despite the recent evolution of architectural programs, we are still very far from this attitude, which does not entail, it should be noted, to dethrone studio education since it proves crucial to acquire the keen understanding evoked above. Narrow professionalism is still dominant and trendy designers are more readily embracing the post-human perspective than willing to acknowledge that the definition of architectural practice must be broadened. Six centuries after the Renaissance, the time has perhaps come to consider architecture as an authentic form of humanism, a humanism deeply reshaped by new and intimate relations between humans and machines.