Dear fellow humans,
As Ken already stated in his 1st reply to this thread, when someone asks "can machines design?" it is absolutely necessary to start replying the question by defining what "design" is. But it it is also necessary to define what "machine" is.
Most people probably think of "a machine" as the stereotypical, deterministic, clockwork mechanism. The runner-up is probably the calculator, which is also deterministic and has the added feature of working with maths. Then there is "computation" which is also related to maths, and so the unspoken definition of "machine" becomes an amalgamation of math + determinism.
It follows that this assumption leads people to think of this debate as a case of "deterministic-machine" vs "unpredictable-human". Of course, it is ridiculous to think that a clock or a pocket calculator (or any other deterministic device, for that matter) could rival a human's creative capabilities — but that's what many people will picture when faced with the question "Can machines design?"
The use of the word "automatic" in previous replies is clearly a symptom of this assumption.
What I argue is that humans are highly predictable, and machines can be pretty random.
There is always an escape from this debate, from either side:
1. Clinging to the past ("To this day, there are no machines that can design better than humans")
2. Clinging to the future ("One day we will have machines that will be able to design better than humans")
Both assertions are true.
What I find interesting is not asserted in the past tense, nor in the future tense, but in the infinitive.
I have the intuition that humans are not so complex after all, and on the other hand are complex enough to create things that can be more complex than themselves.
PS: Beware of other wrong assumptions and false dichotomies, like the "objective-machine vs subjective-human" dichotomy, for instance. This one is solved by situated cognition.
Best regards,
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Carlos Pires
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Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL
Check the project blog:
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