Steering into the Skid

What if any perceived risks of lost authorship and artistic control posed by a wholesale embrace of artificial intelligence by the architectural profession were instead opportunities? AI’s potential to automate design has been pursued for over 50 years, yet aspirations of early researchers are not fully realized. Nonetheless, AI’s advances continue to be rapid; it is an increasingly viable adjunct to architectural practice, and there are fundamental reasons for why the perceived “risks” of AI cannot be dismissed lightly. Architects’ professional role at the intersection of social issues and technology, however, may allow them to avoid the obsolescence faced by other roles. To do this, we propose architects responsively arbitrage an ever-changing gap between maturing AI and mutable social expectations— arbitrage in the sense of seeking to exercise individual judgment to negotiate between diverse considerations and capacities for mutual advantage. Rather than feel threatened, evolving architectural practice can augment an expanded design process to generate and embed new subtleties and expectations that society may judge contemporary AI alone as being unable to achieve. Although there can be no road map to the future of AI in architecture, historical misevaluations of machines and our own human capabilities inhibit the intertwined, synergistic, and symbiotic union with AI needed to avoid a zero-sum confrontation. To act myopically, defensively, or not at all risks straitjacketing future definitions of what it means to be an architect, designer, or even a professionally unaligned creative and productive human being.