the emerging trends

I’ve been seeing different phenomenas lately, from professionals and friends. A friend of mine has written an article about the “crisis” of the 21st century, I don’t really see them as crisis but rather an incentive for change. I’d like to jot down some of it very quickly, it concerns the emerging trends lately and how rapidly things are changing. Without going into broken systems, let’s talk about them. AI and Robotics Computers have became rather competent at basic things. They have became not only tools but now have a basic reasoning capability. I have worked very closely with one of them for a year (“her” name is Kuka, by the way). During this time, we spent experimenting new technics but we have missed the blind spot: they can do consistent, repetitive, menial task precisely. Which, we all know, is not a human strength. With the current system tending towards more efficiency, these tasks will be executed by robots. Which, in my opinion, is not a bad thing in the long term. Humans will have to do the only one thing they’re very good at: invent or reinvent. With the upcoming of quantum computers and the obsolescence of sequential computers, the machine is pretty near the model that we, humans, are built on: simultaneous data processing. With that will emerge a very basic practical form of artificial intelligence. But we’re not there yet.

the robot seems amused by the woman’s seriousness due to her reaching her intellectual limits

Virtual Reality The last years of the first decade, we saw an emergence of something pretty cool: the smartphones and tablets and the like. Its pretty rare to see somebody not playing angry birds or any of that variant in the metro. It goes so far as to create memes about how absorbed people are with this thing. There is an exodus. But it is not a geographical exodus. It’s the digital exodus. Look at your surroundings. See a computer? yes. You’re in there. With the latest up coming technologies, namely the virtual reality, there has been a very big rave. People are really anticipating this. I have ordered one of these techs recently. There will be a stationary and a portable one. Soon, seeing the real world with your own eyes will be strange and people will start migrating in to the virtual realm. It is not surprising since the human nature is about control: the physical and real world is very hard to control. In the ever changing and adapting digital realm, people can absolutely control their environment. Some people will say: “but it’s not real”. Some others will say: “how do you define, real?” It is also interesting to see that this phenomenon is the same reason why we have created the arts and architecture in the first place: control (and we also like to be pleased by what we see).

the guy who said “how do you define real?” is interestingly called Morpheus

Landscape “architecture” This trend is the reversing of the other two. With technology growing fast, things becoming irrelevant and our fucking up of the planet, some sensitive souls are going back to the beginning. I’ve asked the question of the urban landscape which ultimately lead to a theoretical (and it showed to be slightly controversial) project in Zurich.

With the image sharing of the internet, we are saturated by architecture design to the point that it becomes almost hilariously ridicule. Regardless of how hard architecture actually is, we have lost our marvel to the over-inflated egos, real estate investment and ridiculous media. The new generation is starting to disagree with all this development and some friction is created amongst the smartest. Architecture is desperately trying to “reinvent itself”, to no avail, because it is ultimately an art. The excitement of the artificial environment is temporary. The effort is too long. When we understand that all that is purely a trivial pursuit of the unimportant, the trend goes back to the “normal”, to the beginning. And the beginning is nature. The beginning is being human. The beginning is living in harmony with our landscape, shaping it and taking care of it. What is more human than simply being able to live on the planet amongst other lives? It is something that robots can not do. Nor virtual reality. Surpassing overwhelmingly the other trends, it is finally us going back to where it is the most precious: life. And we’ll finally be at peace with our universe.

the absolutely marvellous NY Highline project. everything seems so right

Being three totally different phenomenas, it’s also interesting to see how they mix together. I am of course not saying that this is every single trends, as in some others are important, in medicine and energy and energy, but it serves as an idea catalogue and opens up discussions that are fantastic in the long run.

Cheers for now.

For reference.

My friend Pablo Garcia’s article:

Five crisis in the XXI Century

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