Artificial intelligence has rapidly become ubiquitous in our profession, working its way into theory, into our software’s toolboxes and into our lives. In fact, it is increasingly present in every industry. AI – something that in my childhood was hidden in sci-fi subcultures – has nudged itself insistently into our everyday lives as if it were an obvious good.

Technology is, of course, within us already; we are already hybrid humans and have been for quite some time, long-attended by anxieties around the implications. A mixture of fear and doubt about the consequences of an AI-saturated profession has led me recently to immerse myself in books and podcasts, resisting my natural response which is to reject such technological advancements.

And, as with many things in life, I find myself sitting on my sofa, holding a small slab of lithium, asking what William Morris, the pioneering poet, craftsman, socialist activist and designer, would have done. I’ve often found a critical way forward on big topics in the work and ideas of Morris – what would he make of a design industry saturated with artificial intelligence?

Would Morris see AI and related technological advancements as a potential mechanism for liberating the workers?

Morris has been a very important figure in my life. As a socialist architect, I look up to him for inspiration and insight, and have somehow become dependent on him for everyday life and design decisions as a guiding figure and moral compass that I feel a transcendent kinship with. This gives me a framework to make a set of decisions within the context of an extremely compromised world.

Like us, Morris was dealing with an incredibly fraught society, one then at the height of colonialism, and he did so with an honesty about his own contradictions and complexities as the child of a rich industrialist. In Morris’s words, the ugliness of Victorian industrialisation, and the unequal exploitative society it created, saw much pollution and destruction associated with the growth of capitalism.

The beginning of the Arts and Crafts movement, often framed as the origin of Modernism, starts between Morris taking brass rubbings, his admiration for Ruskin’s interest in nature and the Gothic, and the connection between art and social responsibility. As a result, Morris stands at the crossroads of progressive, enlightened futures and a wistful pull to a pre-industrial past.

Source:muse.ai

Morris was a deeply compromised person in a way that is familiar to many of us as 21st-century humans, attempting to reconcile the multiple demands of a rapidly technologising world. He had multiple facets to his life: a businessman and arbiter of taste, a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, an originator of the conservation movement, a political agitator and a poet. He was also an early sustainability champion. In 1974, Ecologist Journal described Morris as an environmental advocate, championing sustainable practices and advocating for a reconnection with nature, contact with which was then waning in society. 

Morris expressed strong disapproval of industrialisation, criticising its processes, appearances and the resulting pollution and environmental impact. He grappled with the industrial age in the same way society today grapples with the ‘information age’. Were he alive today, would Morris see AI and related technological advancements as a potential mechanism for liberating the workers? Would he understand this technology as paving the path for fairer societies or as a further degrading step toward automation?

Could there be an ethical AI, something disrupted from becoming a new form of colonialism and exploitation, allowing us to reconnect with nature and places?

In his work of fiction, News from Nowhere, Morris looked into the past in a desire to see the future, creating in the process a dreamy, bucolic, idealised rural England. ‘Morris was a visionary, not a clairvoyant,’ wrote Roger Coleman in his lecture Design and Technology from Nowhere, ‘and News from Nowhere is neither prediction nor prescription; instead it is offered as a vision of the future as Morris would have liked to see it’, infused with his love of rural craft and joy in meaningful labour. The 21st century has seen an upswell in attention paid to craft and to nature.

In this context, is Morris’s premise of a ruralist, post-industrial utopia something to aspire to? It is not an anti-mechanical or anti-tech utopia; machines were allowed to do the more degrading jobs previously done by humanity (in a parallel to some emerging uses of AI). Morris believed that, in the right hands, mechanisation and technology could liberate people from onerous and unpleasant work, freeing them to work fewer hours making crafted beautiful things.

Following Morris’s statement that ‘socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers’, could we be heading to an era of digital socialism?

Morris wrote that ‘the true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life’. Having attempted to put this into practice at the Red House in Bexleyheath, he found that the world of design had very little to offer him in terms of products and materials to make the kind of daily life he wanted. This search for meaningful, beautiful domestic wares was the founding idea of his business, what became Morris & Co, and set him on the path of attempting to reconcile his radical politics with selling expensive, handmade artefacts and fabrics to a small elite – the only public who could afford his non-mass-produced products.

Standing in the grounds of Inglesham, a church that Morris helped protect from Victorian ‘improvements’ in favour of delicate restoration, I imagine Clara, Dick and William – the protagonists of News from Nowhere – walking through the surrounding bucolic flatlands, in the lushness of nature, holding their 5G black mirrors.

But in such a world, could there be an ethical AI, something disrupted from becoming a new form of colonialism and exploitation? Something that instead disrupts industry and labour relations and delivers on the dream of a better and more joyful working life, enhanced efficiency, and less material waste. Not driving the value of intellect down but allowing humans to reconnect with nature and places.

In all its glory, News from Nowhere is ultimately a naive work, which I say partly, perhaps, because of my appreciation of the complexity and messiness of the city. The idea that the future would be rural for all is somewhat regressive and hard to imagine ever being put into practice. However, urbanism infused with a strong presence of nature and the wild is somehow a future that I can understand, a better equilibrium with material and the ecosystem.

For now, I feel that Morris would be looking at AI through the lenses of both beauty and politics, and would tell us to disrupt the monopolisation of this new human resource to ensure it brings egalitarianism and planetary stewardship.  

Cristina Monteiro is an architect, author and co-founder of DK-CM



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *