As a technologist, it’s very tempting to embrace the idea of the Singularity, the concept that the digital world will become a powerful artificial intelligence that guides our every action as a species. This concept has an avid promoter in the famous inventor Ray Kurzweil who has written a book and is the subject of a feature-length documentary about these ideas that will be in theaters this year. The far-out ideas that are expressed in this concept are documented nicely in this feature in Vice Magazine, including the thought that we will elevate to nonbiological humans made up of nanoscopic robots, and will have the ability to absorb the entirety of the universe’s knowledge.
This concept should serve as a cautionary tale against an overhyping of the promise of technology. It’s easy also to get swept up in the concept of GeoDesign as a means to solve all the issues around planning our built world so that it’s completely inline with our natural world, alleviating the impacts that we place on this delicate balance.
There’s great promise in the idea of GeoDesign, but a slow and thoughtful evolution would be the best approach, rooting its advancement in the process and actions of all the disciplines that plan, design and manage our world. Rather than looking far into the future to the point where our cities will build themselves, let’s look closer to today to outline the process of responsible and sustainable design in a way that forms a collaborative workflow. A multidisciplinary approach to planning can certainly be aided by technology, but first we need to design the approach. Our built world is regulated by building codes and barriers between disciplines, and in order to proceed many of these barriers must be broken down. These challenges of people, organization and regulation must be addressed first before they can be fully aided by technology.
Certainly our knowledge and understanding of our planet and species is growing. Let’s continue to amass our understanding at a pace that blows all past efforts out of the water in terms of our speed of collection and the level of detail that we capture. However, the ultimate goal of all these activities should not be computers that design society, but a more holistic and inclusive design process that embraces creativity while allowing us to design in concert with nature.
{ 1 trackback }