The watch wristbuzz wakes me gently, with the earbud I left in last night blossoming with optimistic sound waves like ambient dawning. After breakfast maybe I’ll peek at the data and look at the dream-wave signatures, wonder if my sleep was productive, if I’m still grinding my teeth, count signs of nocturnal vigor, haha. So much data. A daily fog of data.
In the shower the ping of a calendar reminder: this morning’s office meeting will be a pioneering one, a potential landfall after a season of drift: the last of the program linkages between design departments in the studio were cloud-loaded and enabled last night. Today we find out if the new design software can be more than the sum of its parts. I opened up all current work to the DesignMind program (or DM as us old-school folks call it) and after some debate, we dismantled the firewalls and teased the nerve links to connect to Alphanet. Alphanet owns the out-of-the-box DM, pre-adoption as it were, and with this new baby neural net our DM architectural modeling program will, theoretically, wake up and learn and absorb basically everything any architect has ever drawn digitally.
The total digital sphere of architectural influence will be folded into the Buildspace. Our Buildspace. That, combined with the scans of every major historic work of architecture libraried online, will make for pretty deep knowledge of how and why and what us humans have built anywhere on this earth. My team says it will be like giving LSD to a child with a CrayonApp on an old iPhone (I never know if their metaphors are supposed to be a good thing or bad...) They are usually so rhapsodic about big data and the potentialities of a machine learning assist, but I don’t know now... Anything that helps produce an array of possibilities so we can whittle down the design options from infinite to one could be a great thing. I will always be there to sift and sort from the best iterations myself: DM cannot know the best result because it doesn’t intuit. That’s all I do anymore in this thought processing world: Feel my way through. That’s my value.
Dress and signal the Coffeepour. Do I need the Faraday tactical suit today at client’s office? They wouldn’t dare to try stealing the BIM file library from our phones again. Driveway message from the car: expect good battery storage today, with forecast for clear skies. Full charge. Drone deliveries stack against the garage, blocking the gate again—can they not stay in the pad zone? Refrigerator and pantry must have colluded for a simultaneous food order. Last time this happened they accessed my HealthChart and revised my milk order to skim and added vegetables pulled from the wife’s recipe search history. All because my cholesterol is still high? I need to figure out the overrides.
Car says fourteen minute drive to office with negligible traffic risk probability—I’ll let it get me there and interface with the team en route. Did I leave the house without saying goodbye again? Everyone is in their own world all the time. I rail against them but I am the one lost in a virtual space most often. What’s the matter with me? This is what we’ve become? Getting that uncomfortable feeling again that we’re in the future and it’s not what we thought it would be. “Phone: add family time to weekly calendar, merge available times, set recurring. Then call studio. And put me in everyone’s ears.”
“Folks, why would the generative chorus run more than once last night? It should have enough resolution on best solutions after one pass, right?” (I might not have my head under the hood, but I know what the engine should sound like.)
The office replies: “Brian, you know DM assembles all project files on the server when initialized; it swallows google earth, sat imagery and utility data, it knows the program square footages the building needs, every parameter and constraint. Construction budget. Equity investor tendencies and market valuations. Previous work built by this client. It’s digested everything. The generator ran and kept running.”
“So when I get in we can look at the iterations and steer it where we want it to grow.”
“It isn’t following list commands anymore. It’s just. You’ll see.”
“What will I see?”
“Maybe your access code can reboot, but it’s done. The building is designed. It says it’s complete, it’s run accessibility and code review, clash detection, all the obvious stuff. It’s not waiting for...your approvals... that sounds strange to say out loud.”
“Sending you my temp log-ins now; let’s back the timeline up to concept mode and not let it play out to full constr—“
“Brian, it’s done. We’re just sitting here paging through a 324 sheet set, engineering and all, put together by DM. Window details. Landscape. Exterior envelope with perfect execution. Solar shading studies. Predictive reads on energy use... it ran scripts for renderings even, they seem to emulate the moody atmospheres from our previous work. Novel color schemes, in a way. Wait, it’s...”
“What? There are literally thousands of decisions to make before the design can be complete—wait, what does it look like?”
“T says the program is preparing a download site... It’s downloading the model offsite! It’s downloading itself to itself? That doesn’t make sense... What does it look like? It looks like something we thought you could do on your best day. It’s nice, you know, tasteful. Good plan. Perfect plan, really. None of those serendipitous moments that you seem to get excited about though, those little spiritual efforts that you’re always pushing us to be open to and looking for. Sense of wonder or whatever. That’s all subjective though, right? But it’s a totally complete thought, like it knows you, you know? K thinks you’re playing with us. Are you playing with us?”
“Pulling in now, I’ll be right up. Double the office air recycle if you don’t mind. We’ll call the client and...”
“... Looks like it sent itself to the client’s server early this morning. Why wouldn’t it have told us that? It’s embedded your stamp and forwarded itself to the city’s Bureau of Buildings. Now it’s scanning across all Amazon for fabricators? Could it be following through on the what-ifs in our meeting minutes? Your log in permissions look like ours now... they can’t override or reset or even delete. None of us can interfere with it now. What should we work on in the meantime? The program seems to be cycling through all of our active projects... Hello? Are you still there?”