This project investigated the changing world brought about by automation and A.I. technologies and asked, how will architecture respond to this second machine age.
The resulting design proposal occupies a world in which this paper summarises as fully automated luxury communism, an abundant world where productivity has risen and the working week reduced, giving way to a leisure based lifestyle.
The second machine age has the potential to create a more abundant world, one where more output is met with less capital, materials and labour input. There are many arguments for a positive and negative future but this research adopts the optimistic viewpoint, taking place within the desired outcome. A framework for a functioning future is outlined and gives the basis for the social system that will form from this new world, a world where labour hours decline with time as automation takes over all menial tasks and the human is left to play, and a future where automation and robots are owned by a state-owned enterprise and the wealth generated is shared between the citizens of that country. The research showcases this agenda and argues that capitalism can’t survive in this modern world, leading onto what is described as post capitalism.
This research then sought out an answer to this technological revolution. In a world where society predominantly spend its time within architecture, and a majority of that time within the ‘home’, it becomes important to understand how architecture will adapt to this changing environment. By exploring speculative design as well as utopian architectural ideals, a framework for a successful proposal was formed. By understanding how society currently spends its time, a correlation can be drawn against how society will use the time gained through advancing automation technologies. The architecture of the future then moves away from the individualisation of the neoliberal era, where one thinks in terms of ‘I’ and ‘me’, and into the collective social that is society: an architecture that promotes leisure and interaction and the growth of collective social groups within the greater picture of the city.
47% of employment is at risk of being replaced by computers.1
1. Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2013). The future of employment. How susceptible are jobs to computerisation.
The ratio of population to employment is currently at a 20-year low and real income is currently at a 30-year low. However, productivity, after tax corporate profits, GDP and corporate investment are at record highs.2
2. McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2014). The Second Machine Age. Work, Progress, and prosperity in time of brilliant technologies. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Society could be heading towards a new age of unprecedented unemployment with the introduction of automation and artificial intelligence within all sectors of employment.3
3. Pfannebecker, M., & Smith, J. A. (2017). The Long Read: What Will We Do in the Post-Work Utopia? Retrieved 13 Apr., 2017
Optimism helps define the future as ‘synthetic freedom’, where automation has created a new world of abundance and humans are liberated from repetitive; mundane work giving full personal autonomy.
