It was at Lockheed Martin in 2010 that I first asked a machine for his opinion and perspective on design. In 2007 Lockheed bought his 3D simulation company and I started my own Skunkworks called Virtual World Labs. We played with AI, machine learning, virtual reality, and augmented reality. One of our projects was trying to build a display for the F35 helmet. I needed a high resolution display with a viewing angle of 160 degrees. The pilot will be able to check the surrounding situation through the sensor. The plane becomes invisible like Wonder Woman, with only sensor data showing the world around it.
When we communicated these design constraints to our human engineers, they all shook their heads violently and muttered our favorite words like “impossible” and “impossible with the materials we have.” I was. But we had something they didn’t have. Arrogant, yes. A new button has also been added to the calculator. We have a new scientific method.
There was machine learning.
We knew we could ask a machine learning system to develop any possible hypothesis without constraints. We humans then tell the machine which theories hold promise in terms of our tiny human brains. We encourage them to dig deeper and iterate on them. Thus we watched him design a 160-degree helmet out of materials that humans had not yet considered to achieve the shape and design that the machine needed.
We watched the AI design the shape needed for each lens and recommend materials that humans can use to achieve their design goals.
Fast forward to December 2022. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times for creative professionals. Generative AI has suddenly changed the landscape below us all. Months later, those working with producers and creators are still struggling with shift, reorientation, reorientation strategies and coping mechanisms.
But there is not just one light at the end of this singularity tunnel. Many tunnels wind into the future and many lights. There are their constellations. Which field you should pursue depends on the stage of your career, your grit and audacity, and the industry and creative path you have chosen or have taken you.
We are in the middle of the third (and final) stage of the Information Age. There, relevant information and computational systems are being created that are beyond our understanding and control.
Elon Musk and others are calling for a halt to all development so that business models can be clarified and social and financial chaos avoided. People are worried that AI will take their jobs. And lawyers are waking up to sue for copyright and trademark infringement. And a general anger and disbelief that the ancient financial model of trading wads of money at trading hours is dying out.
What does this mean for creative and design professionals? Read on to hear the dark implications for our future and the light at the end of many winding tunnels.
Generative AI: Where Are We Going and Where Are We Going?
I liken the information age to a game of chess. Chess has his three stages: opening, middle and end. There are only a few surprises in the season opener. The game is decided in the middle stage. There are as many potential games in the middle as there are stars in the galaxy.
We have just completed the first stage of the information age. At that stage, we created a powerful technology. Then we painfully adapted to their conditions so that we could take advantage of them. We learned to program in arcane languages to communicate with computers. We were desktop-bound, flickering screens, keyboarding, suffering from eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. In the first stage of the information age, what we made made us.
In the beginning, our technology demanded too much of us and overworked us. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen schools, hospitals, architecture firms, and businesses large and small embrace technology, completely change their habits, shift their focus, and redesign their living and working spaces to meet the demands of technology. I’ve seen you do We attended training courses for days and weeks. Humans design better products, work and living environments, educate children, heal people, manufacture and move goods, and provide services that make people’s lives better and more productive. We tend to forget the real purpose of our efforts, such as what we do.
They will fall into the Faustian deal of serving technology instead of doing the noble and creative things they initially set out to do.
We are flooded with data. Information, news, ads, apps, videos, and images all compete for our attention. Classifying, sorting, and filtering the increasingly crowded and confusing data space of the Internet is becoming increasingly difficult. What should I pay attention to and what can I safely ignore?
Machines are better in many ways. Humans are still superior to others for the time being. Combining these two robust computational systems, human and machine, yields the best results. It does it with the least amount of human effort required. And with the ability to inspire and inspire generative AI in the direction of your design dreams, you can create faster and more productively than ever before. With these robust systems serving us personally, we are ushering in a new era that is transforming our relationship with technology.
It gets tough when our silicon descendants start developing their own goals that are probably not aligned with ours. That’s when things can go off track.
This is the worst possible situation.
Less covered in the press on generative AI systems is that in the first two stages of the information age, we have been comfortable operating on the idea that machines will not take over certain areas of human effort. It means that . We used to think that machines are good at computing, storing, and retrieving, but only humans can imagine, dream, and create art and music. We now have ample evidence that imagination is no longer a purely organic animal activity. Our silicon descendants can dream, imagine, and even hallucinate. You can write poetry and novels, compose music and art. Machines are now creators of the entire world. The plight of creative professionals seems dire as companies begin to prefer a near-free creative cycle by machines to humans. But there is another point of view. Perhaps a human creative expert adept at guiding machines with design constraints, directions, and prompts will emerge as the new Hans Moravesian “more powerful form of man.”
It’s the best of times.
With these new cyborg powers, superhuman gifts, designers may soon become godlike in their ability to design and create. In this powerful new machine-obsessed form, the designer harnesses the holistic perspective and power of everything human-made and everything the new alien machine perspective dreams (or hallucinates). can be used to design and create new solutions.
Gone are the days of getting stuck in a creative rut and staring at a blank canvas (whether 2D, 3D or more). You can now encourage your AI muse to inspire and create. We are now conductors blending brass, woodwind and machine input rhythm sections to create a new symphony of creative output.
We became the creators of cyborgs, a combination of man and machine. Lone humans without these skills are considered unnatural and handicapped.
Inheriting the spirit of Fred Brooks’ design bible, design of designdesigners, architects, engineers, and computer scientists, the future role is to define the problem, describe the utility functions or goals of AI, and provide some design constraints, so that AI can start.
In some cases, we may seek human feedback, clarification, or assistance in new cybernetic feedback loops. At some point in the not-too-distant future, these neural nets will evolve to fully understand our needs, set their own goals and constraints, design without our guidance, and receive feedback and opinions. You may only contact us from time to time to ask. And we will be the final skirmish in the age of humans assisting AI, the age-old battle of capital versus labor. In that case, we have to get used to the idea that machine goals are not necessarily human goals, and that singularity event horizons engulf us all.
Looking back now, I realize that Lockheed Martin’s engineering moment in 2010, when it first asked AI to help with its design, was a harbinger of future nodes. But for design professionals, I believe this will be the best-case scenario for some time, as AI continues to help us reach our goals.
Co-author with the late Fred Brooks.
