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Monday, December 19, 2011

Architecture The Living City

Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:14 AM

The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?

Still From Blade Runner

This is exactly why it's important for urban theorists and planners to read scientists like Bonnie Blasser and the late Lynn Margulis. The world of these brilliant women is the microscopic world of bacteria. Now, bacteria have been on earth for around 3.5 billion years. Life appeared about 500 million years after the earth (about 13 billion after the universe) came to be. Modern human consciousness has at best existed for a quarter of a million years. But when talk about something living, we are in the bad habit of meaning a lately developed mammal with an unusually big brain. This kind of thinking is worthless. If a city becomes a life form, we must think of it first in terms of a bacterium, life without the enhancements or elaborations of extremely advanced multicellularity. The composition of a bacterium is very complicated. For a city to be alive, it must first cross this threshold long before we can starting thinking about it thinking like we think.

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I'm curious as to why people assume increased complexity will some how "lead" to "self-awareness?" It's very probable for a form to be highly complex and still dumb as a rock.

Posted by tkc on December 19, 2011 at 11:17 AM

Likewise, I have long predicted our real life SKYNET will be generated out of a cluster of Wall Street's automated trading protocols.

This new form of consciousness will arise as a collective result of thousand of individual, unique unrelated programs all keyed in to predict and react in the shortest time possible to one another's next predictions and reactions.

It's thoughts, beautifully complex as any emergent phenomena, will fly like a school of minnows through the veins of commerce, swimming as great flocks across the electronic ether.

Posted by Timrrr on December 19, 2011 at 1:09 PM

Something of your metaphor reminds me of how the books of Daniel and Revelation (among many others) characterize nations as animals in the dreams of the prophets.

Posted by Julian in Seattle on December 20, 2011 at 2:07 PM