Less Automation / More Equality
Machinery haven’t just arrived at our workplace yet. It is at the moment expanding its skills, showing great productivity and retention rates, and increasingly pushing aside its human counterparts. Amazon can deliver you a jacket you purchased from Rick Owen website within a few hours and will soon replace an entire USP crew. Self-driven cars will drive you to the office while you are reading top stories from BBC on its front glass and they will replace all the Uber and Lyft drivers. While technology, our mental creations, have been evolving at a much faster rate than our physical body, less automation / more equality world will only remind us of being human. 200,000 years of foraging compared with the 10,000 years of agriculture compared with the 100 years of industrialized living compared with the last 15 years of widespread personal computers and cell phones. My scenario of the future takes place in the world where a balance between the pursuit of knowledge and physical activity is believed to be crucial for maintaining sanity in this life.
The image I created, which is shown on the first page, shows my scenario of where the world ends up going towards in the near future. Human evolution of what we might think of is crossing the abbey road towards the city that was described in the scene of “Hyper-Reality” by Keiichi Matsuda, although the “terminator” is pointing a shotgun at human and threatening him from crossing the street. This image indicates that human is in danger of being lost in the near future. All caused by automation. Although history tells us that technology and automation tend to create more jobs than they destroy, we are not catching up with creating those jobs because of the frequent invention of new technology. We should not keep going with a policy that is foreseen giving up on the possibility of workers remaining employed. First of all, our goal should be to champion skills, training, job hunting assistance, and the other market to confirm people can get into jobs. While at the moment Donald Trump is blaming immigrants for the loss of jobs in the United States, automation is going to replace the role of them in the near future as it has started to draw more attentions. And that is how we’re going to hit the automation crisis. After realizing that we cannot let the automation replace us, we’re going to eliminate those that directly take our jobs. We’re going to use technology / automation as tekhne (art, craft, tool), Greek word that the word technology was originated.
In the less automation/ more equality world, the government won’t exist anymore as it’s formed now. Reaching towards the automation crisis, we figured out the algorithm to replace the government and govern people only based on math. It will give everyone a certain land to increase more equality in the world and prevent automation to widespread to the public. They are given from the government as the city or your profession requires it. Thus, people will move away from the city as they were paying $3000 for a dog house before, they don’t need to be in the city to work because the internet and the video chat are still going to be around. Within each community, there is a market that sell fresh vegetables and fruits that are locally grown. We are using the technology to modify soil conditions and temperatures for the best environment for the plants so you’ll have all kinds of foods that you can get. Although technology figured out the way to create an environment for farming, workers still have to watch and carefully control the environment for the plants to grow. Since this is for small community and workers can watch over every single plants they grow, they can avoid wasting a lot of resources. The self-driven cars will still be remained in this world, but they take a role of more of public transportation. About half of the automobiles are going to be self-driven cars that people can use for cheaper price as you would take a metro nowadays. And the other half are human driven cars which take the role of Uber nowadays and drive you to work a lot quicker than self-driven cars. The world of less automation / more equality world is going to be similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s utopia “Broadacre City.” Now, what would the role of the architects would be in this world? Who will design the building environment? How does the practice change?
In the past 20 years, technology has changed the way we make things. Back in the day, manufacturing and fabrication were all done by people’s hand. Within 15 years of widespread personal computers and technology have broken into the industry, automation has become the advantage in the manufacturing world today. Automation has allowed us to produce many products within the short period of time and with great repeatability and quality. Creating a physical model by using laser cutter or 3D printers has become very normal and the automation has become the key factor for the architecture practices whether to remain competitive within the industry. As we reach the automation crisis, I believe that there will be a big reduction of professionals that call themselves architects. As the automation gives architect the reduction in production time, increase in accuracy and repeatability, less human error, and less employee costs, it is becoming much easier and cheaper to build a building. Moreover, with the development of 3D printer for building types and parametric design that can “design” you an architecture, anyone would be able to design a building. Even nowadays there are a lot of architecture firms that wouldn’t call themselves architects, and they deliver a broader service such as interior design, product design, or installation design. However, in the less automation / more equality world, architects will be much more appreciated since the automation will be limited by the government. There won’t be an automation which people can design and build a house just like how we now can design our own web page with using template given by companies such as squarespace. And coding and regulations are only given to the architects by the government. Thus, people would actually need to hire an architect to build a house. Although the disadvantage of this world for the design firms would be that they are no longer allowed to have the freedom of designing master plans. Because the government mathematically figures out how much land should people have and draws the grids for the city, the aerial view of the city won’t look as unique as Paris, Barcelona, or Rome. This prevent the architect from having a characteristic topography, and site boundary which could potentially lead the designers to be more creative. The architects have to work within the similar boundaries. Since the site is eliminated from architects’ one of the design aspect, it sets out the competition between architects to design buildings that shows more of the characters. With more materials available in the future, architects will have an opportunities to create more interesting buildings rather than boxes because people will want the city to look unique. Without having the freedom of the master planning, and people always have the desire for your city to look nice, it is not hard to picture that architects will be able to design what the community wants in this world. The architects in this world have many choices of design process since there will be more competitions in having unique buildings in the city. A few architect will start designing from the physical models, the other will be using 3D modeling software, and the other will be using VR to stimulate the real scale so they can actually carry an18 foot I beam to put it where they want it to be. What I believe would happen is that there won’t be any parametricism buildings that Patrick Schumacher believes in. They were so popular before the automation crisis hit, but in this less automation / less equality world people find them old fashioned and they want more versatility that human has to look for more characters. With the tools still be available, architects will use the software in the different way.
In the less automation / more equality world, we realize that human needs to remain human and cannot let automation destroy ourselves. Although we won’t eliminate automation from our society completely, we will find a good balance where automation can still help our growth and we can be creating jobs for what we invent. We will use the automation to have more equality rather than taking people’s job. We will have a Broadacre City with similar to post modern architecture movement where architects challenges the materiality and versatility to create more character with the help of technology. In the “Enough” by Bill McKibben, he says “Ever advancing improvements would turn humans into the equivalent of obsolete computers. In such a world, by the time your genetically enhanced child reaches school age, children being born will be that much better engineered - more intelligent, good looking and above average. "They'll be Windows 2050 to his Atari." It is only right that we have a control over automation, because otherwise terminator would pull that trigger.
