杏吧原创

THE Polish futurist Stanislaw Lem once wrote: 鈥淎 scientist wants an algorithm, whereas the technologist is more like a gardener who plants a tree, picks apples, and is not bothered about 鈥榟ow the tree did it鈥�.鈥�

For Lem, the future belongs to technologists, not scientists. If Mario Carpo is right and the 鈥渟econd digital turn鈥� described in his extraordinary new book comes to term, then Lem鈥檚 playful, 鈥�imitological鈥� future where analysis must be abandoned in favour of creative activity, will be upon us in a decade or two. Never mind our human practice of science, science itself will no longer exist, and our cultural life will consist of storytelling, gesture and species of magical thinking.

Carpo studies architecture. Five years ago, he edited The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012, a book capturing the curvilinear, parametric spirit of digital architecture. Think Frank Gehry鈥檚 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao 鈥� a sort of deconstructed metal fish head 鈥� and you are halfway there.

Such is the rate of change that five years later, Carpo has had to write another book (the urgency of his prose is palpable and thrilling) about an entirely different kind of design. This is a generative design powered by artificial intelligence, with its ability to thug through digital simulations (effectively, breaking things on screen until something turns up that can鈥檛 be broken) and arriving at solutions that humans and their science cannot better.

This kind of design has no need of casts, stamps, moulds or dies. No costs need be amortised. Everything can be a one-off at the same unit cost.

Beyond the built environment, it is the spiritual consequences of this shift that matter, for by its light Carpo shows all cultural history to be a gargantuan exercise in information compression.

Unlike their AIs, human beings cannot hold much information at any one time. Hence, for example, the Roman alphabet: a marvel of compression, approximating all possible vocalisations with just 26 characters. Now that we can type and distribute any glyph at the touch of a button, is it any wonder emojis are supplementing our tidy 26-letter communications?

Science itself is simply a series of computational strategies to draw the maximum inference from the smallest number of precedents. Reduce the world to rules and there is no need for those precedents. We have done this for so long and so well some of us have forgotten that 鈥渞ules鈥� aren鈥檛 鈥渞eal鈥� rules, they are just generalisations.

AIs simply gather or model as many precedents as they wish. Left to collect data according to their own strengths, they are, Carpo says, 鈥減ostscientific鈥�. They aren鈥檛 doing science we recognise: they are just thugging.

鈥淐arpo shows all cultural history to be a gargantuan exercise in information compression鈥�

Carpo foresees the 鈥渟eparation of the minds of the thinkers from the tools of computation鈥�. But in that alienation, I think, lies our reason to go on. Because humans cannot handle very much data at any one time, sorting is vital, which means we have to assign meaning. Sorting is therefore the process whereby we turn data into knowledge. Our inability to do what computers can do has a name already: consciousness.

Carpo鈥檚 succinctly argued future has us return to a tradition of orality and gesture, where these forms of communication need no reduction or compression since our tech will be able to record, notate, transmit, process and search them, making all cultural technologies developed to handle these tasks 鈥渆qually unnecessary鈥�. This will be neither advance nor regression. Evolution, remember, is maddeningly valueless.

Could we ever have evolved into Spock-like hyper-rationality? I doubt it. Carpo鈥檚 sincerity, wit and mischief show that Prospero is more the human style. Or Peter Pan, who observed: 鈥淵ou can have anything in life, if you will sacrifice everything else for it.鈥�

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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔uture by design鈥�