TANGERINE FOCUS

Well the dismal science is more dismal than you might have guessed from the self-deprecating humor of economists naming their discipline this way.

(expand the detail arrow below):

“The dismal science” is a well-known nickname for the academic discipline of economics.

“The dismal science” is a well-known nickname for the academic discipline of economics. 

Today, people use the phrase as a joke or a critique because economics often focuses on depressing topics like scarcity, recessions, inflation, and hard financial choices. However, the real history behind the phrase is quite different and darker. Investopedia

The True Origin of the Term

• The Creator: Scottish writer and essayist Thomas Carlyle first used the phrase in 1849. Wikipedia
• The Essay: He wrote it in an essay called “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”. Investopedia
• The Real Reason: Carlyle did not mean it was gloomy about money. Instead, he was angry at economists who believed in human equality and opposed slavery. Economists argued that freedom and equal rights should apply to everyone, but Carlyle supported slavery and a strict racial hierarchy. Investopedia 2
• The Contrast: Carlyle compared economics to “the gay science,” which was an old-fashioned term for poetry and art. Because economics taught that people were equal and deserved liberty, he labeled it “dismal”. The Library of Economics and Liberty +3

To be consistent, we’d nickname AI in accord with the way it’s described by those responsible for it, Doomsday Science, or: “The Doomsday Device”.

The photo below of Jimmy Buffet jumping into Biscayne Bay during his August 16, 1985 show at the Miami Marine Stadium, ended the preceding post on this blog, If a Machine will do AEC Thinking, let’s start with this: What is AEC Thinking?:

If a Machine will do AEC Thinking, let’s start with this: What is AEC Thinking?

This photo was a great way to end that post. But there’s more to say. Let’s jump in and all go for a swim.

The point of the previous post was just to state the obvious:

if AI is going to do actual AEC thought, then maybe we oughta think for 2 seconds about what AEC thought is.

Here’s what it is:

The mental model is put into formation, and sharpened by this exercise, the wide-narrow (environment-focus) interplay in the cyan text on black background above.

Almost all AEC software omits the digital model from this exercise entirely, leaving the interplay to be carried out as mental exercise alone with no assist whatsoever from the digital model.

Now if The Doomsday device is gonna take over and do that…

…the first question is, why would anyone want that?

Why would anyone who does anything interesting in life, be interested in this?

Would Jimmy Buffet be interested?

Would you? Are you misanthropic?

There’s a guy, Buffet, who writes and performs music based on his LIFE,

Which is why you love it.

Yeah, AI can “generate” music (“music”).

Read that sentence above.

What are you even talking about?

AI can generate music.
And it’s absolute S H E I T and nobody gives 2 flying F’s about it.

I guess that’s exactly what’s meant by Doomsday Device:

Everything is S H E I T and nobody gives 2 flying F’s about it.

Sure, it’ll crank out architectural sheit endlessly. There will be no Jimmy Buffet, musician with his leg broken 3 times in a year. There will be no Frank Loyd Wright with his family murdered and his Taliesen burning down.

There will just be one corporation with one machine, or swarms of “agents”, churning out sheit until there’s no tomorrow, which is the day after no one gives a sheit.

None of this is new. It’s just a question of degree, and approaching totality.

The ACME Corporation:

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are fictional characters from the Looney Tunesand Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons, first appearing in 1949 in the theatrical short Fast and Furry-ous. In each film, the cunning, devious and constantly hungry coyote repeatedly attempts to catch and eat the roadrunner, but is humorously unsuccessful.^[10] Instead of using animal instinct, the coyote deploys absurdly complex schemes and devices to try to catch his prey. They comically backfire, with the coyote invariably getting injured in slapstick fashion. Many of the items for these contrivances are mail-ordered from the Acme Corporation and other companies. 

. . . Jones based the coyote on Mark Twain‘s book Roughing It,^[13] in which Twain described the coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton” that is “a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” 

_{Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner}

Rube Goldberg Machines:

The concept dates back at least to 1914:

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way. First appearing in a cartoon for the New York Evening Mail, these machines consist of a series of simple unrelated devices; the action of each triggers the initiation of the next, eventually resulting in achieving a stated goal.

The term “Rube Goldberg machine“ comes from the cartoonist by the same name, Rube Goldberg, who would illustrate many of these machines.^[1] The first Rube Goldberg machine was drawn by him in 1914, titled the Automatic Weight-Reducing Machine drawn for the “Inventions!” section of the New York Evening Mail. In the cartoon, the machine uses a variety of objects to get an overweight person to become trapped in a hole. The man is then starved until he is thin enough to pass through the hole and escape.^[1]
_{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Something_for_nothing_(1940).ogv}

Not all tech is like that (see below). But yeah, we always choose either to counterproductively overcomplicate, or to put tech on target. 

Imagine improving a Rube Goldberg machine by encompassing it within a vastly more complex much larger Rube Goldberg machine to drive it.

Now THAT’s advanced thinking!

Wow!

By the way, that same year, a very useful machine, the first autopilot, 1914:

The Sperry autopilot is a historic gyroscopic flight stabilization system invented by Lawrence Sperry in 1914. It used spinning gyroscopes to automatically control an airplane’s surfaces, allowing hands-off, straight-and-level flight and revolutionizing aviation safety and long-distance navigation.

Invention and Public Demonstration
Lawrence Sperry famously demonstrated the device on June 18, 1914, at an aviation safety contest in Paris. By walking out onto the biplane’s wings while the aircraft continued to fly itself stably, he proved the reliability of his three-axis gyroscopic stabilizer.

_{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot}

Convincing!

Proof!

Nice thing about it is the clear purpose, and the sensible use of tech targeting a core problem and with the problem actually resolved, directly, and absent all the grandiose promises.

By the way, as far as I know, no one referred to auto-pilot as “AI”, neither in 1914 nor since.

Is this the future we’re promised?

A dismal doomsday future where everything is sheit and nobody gives a sheit. Where everything we otherwise would have done or used to do is replaced by ACME corporation generations.

A future where the lessons learned from Rube Goldberg are not to put tech on target solving real problems.

But rather to make tech a leviathan that flattens everything by inserting itself everywhere not just as an overcomplicated system but as a Rube Goldberg machine taken exponentially to the power of Rube squared at least, or even greater exponential powers.

Take a Rube Goldberg machine and “improve” it by building a new vastly larger and much more overcomplicated Rube Goldberg machine, to encapsulate and drive all previous Rube Goldberg machines.

To take this back to AEC:

1. The task is straightforward: Looking with Intent and Showing that you did
2. 40+ years of AEC software is demonstrably, already and has long been, deeply anchored in Rube Goldberg machine territory.
3. Adding “AI” around this is RGmachine squared (RGmachine²)
4. Some AEC firms will throw in the towel and return to pencils on paper.
   • Their efficiency and productivity may increase relative to RGmachine and RGmachine².
     • This should be tested, scientifically.
5. Tech could get digital modeling aimed directly at the core non-optional work of AEC professions (see item 1 in this list).
   1. https://tangerinefocus.com
   2. this could be done with or without AI involvement (there is a role for it there)
   3. The longer digital modeling drifts along without this, the further RGmachine drifts toward RGmachine² or RGmachine¹⁶ (16th power is an exaggeration, already at ⁽²⁾ it might as well be ^(∞).