Clocks and Clouds:
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Architectonic Disposition

Prof. Karla Saldaña Ochoa, Dr. Riccardo M. Villa

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be considered the outcome and the reason for a paradigm shift. Amongst the changes introduced by AI, there is undoubtedly a novel relationship with technology: for a long time, technical tools have been considered “neutral” vis-à-vis their users—to the extent that precisely the technical nature of modern science long stood as a warranty of its objective character—and yet, after AI, it seems almost impossible to discuss technology without mentioning what kind of bias it might convey. Such an issue clashes with the claim of fairness typical of cybernetic systems or any process in which the so-called “human element” does not play any decisional role. Furthermore, AI seems to expose society to the danger of enhancement and totalisation of such biases whenever it becomes a device of control—through the encoding, within AI, of a determinate alignment. And yet, at the same time, AI seems to be extremely useful, a “tool” that is able to perform tasks at another scale, incommensurable to one of the “traditional” computational tools. Compared to the latter, AI is faster and more powerful. Even more importantly, AI recently has moved from a rule-based or parametric model to one that is not subject to or designed by preconceptions of the world but instead is data-driven and malleable, in which order is conveyed “plastically,” not through a rigid scheme provided by a set of positive rules.

The non-neutrality and the plastic character of AI urge us to rethink it not just as a tool, but as an instrument. A tool is conceived for a particular use—we could say that it institutes a ‘linear’ relationship between purpose and goal, cause and effect. An instrument, on the other hand,can be played: its goal is not a ‘punctual’ one but one that materializes across different scales (think, for instance, at the difference between a hammer and a piano). Furhtermore, instruments are about objects as much as subjects: they do not affect just their ‘products’ but their users, too: in the moment one plays the piano becomes a pianist, whereas whenever one uses a tool such as a hammer, she is not perceived as a ‘hammerist’. Within instruments, subjects and objects entertain a two-way exchange, a form of communication.

Our course wants to insist on this “instrumental” nature of AI Such a nature can be conceived, in architectonic terms, through the figure of the garden. The garden is a locus of encounter and of communication between what is traditionally thought of in terms of opposites: it is both natural and artificial, private and public. Most importantly, though, the garden effaces antinomies between subjects and objects, as it deals both with the subjective picture of the landscape and the objective one of the environments. In such an encounter, subjective biases can be plastically and objectively shaped as architectural intents.

Moreover, the garden offers a model of thinking plasticity in architectural terms: its design is not an execution of a pre-existing design, but its design and execution immanently overlap; its construction is a continuous contract with chance, exposed to the ‘randomness’ of the weather. Through such a model, AI can be rethought as a computational instrument that does not deal with data in terms of pre-determinacy. Still, in a ‘quantum’ way—it operates in between the ‘cloud’ of data and the ‘clock’ of computer hardware. Presenting a locus that escapes both mechanistic determinacy and total contingency, thinking of A.I. in terms of “gardening” can be a fruitful way to introduce the question of ethics and develop it in an architectonic way.

Through a series of lectures, the course will offer a series of such figures through which to rethink AI by abstracting from the technocratic and solution-driven optics that dominate the contemporary discourse on it to achieve instead an architectonic understanding of it. Participants will be then asked to ‘activate’ the content of the lectures by inverting their perspective and sketching a course for the architecture school that would involve an A.I. instrument of their design.