THINK AHEAD OF THE ROBOTS

An article in the New York Times today talks about higher education’s need to teach their students the skills necessary to remain relevant in face of the robotic revolution.  The article mentions how a computer can intake the factual information in seconds that humans take a lifetime to accumulate.  Robots are poised to assume great power.  So the solution seems to be to train students to think creatively.

Some of the specific traits that colleges want to instill include:

-complex communication skills

-expert knowledge that is broad and deep

-information interpretation

-the ability to solve uncharted problems

-cultivation of an entrepreneurial mindset

If this is not a description of what architects do and how they think, I don’t know what is.  Of course the article does not mention the design fields.  Articles like this never do.

I’ve said this before and I will say it again.  I simply don’t know why architects are not put in the position to solve the world’s problems.  We are trained from day 1 to think and solve problems that have not been solved before.  We are trained to amass a very deep information base and we are trained to communicate that information.  And we solve uncharted problems every day.