in the last couple of years say (2011) i saw a promotional video from Corning about all the fascinating developments and breakthrough innovations that were happening at their glass laboratories. at the time i found them jaw dropping but now i am even more amazed to know that the same concepts and technologies were already being speculated about in 1977. In the link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0) the speculation about incorporating displays and responsive elements everywhere, from the bathroom mirror to replace blueprints is a positive one (if you don’t mind being connected and reachable in one way or another 24/7 – 365 or the never ending stream of information).
in Man-Computer Symbiosis, its quite a complicated idea of man asking the questions and the computer calculating all possible variables + producing answers. someone once told me that the future of knowledge is not about the answer itself but about how to ask the right questions. today, computers still require human input and to a degree human supervision; however, it is theorized that soon technology will take a leap towards artificial intelligence or as people like to refer to it (The Singularity) in which case we will see if we remain in control or if we develop a human exterminating intelligence a la Skynet (terminator). another thing that comes to mind is the idea of Roko’s Basilisk in which a sentient artificial intelligence that will appear sometime in the future punishes or rewards the people that didn’t or did help create it in the first place. link: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko’s_basilisk
machines that replace architects!, i share the same thinking of Walter Gropius on the idea that designers are born and not trained. even though a person can learn how to gather and process information (or the lack of it), he/she can not learn the intuition, the gut feeling that a solution is the best fitting for a problem. machines (and software) are aids to the architect and i don’t think they will ever replace the person in the profession since its cornerstones (curiosity, ingenuity and intuition) are precisely what define us as human.
