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Ask Slashdot: Could An AI Conceivably Create Futureproof Product Designs?
dryriver writes: Whether you are into consumer electronics, cars, furniture or other manufactured things, one aspect of them doesn't change -- the physical design or "look" of the product tends to age badly in our perception as newer products are released. When you first buy the product it looks "sexy and new"; 5 years down the road, it just looks kind of "old" or "less sophisticated" compared to the newer, sleeker products. To the question: Could you get an artificial intelligence powered by a neural network to train on hundreds of product designs created over the last 20 years -- possibly by laser-scanning products in 3D or providing 3D CAD files -- and learn with great sophistication how product design or "product looks" evolve as time passes? Could that AI then be coaxed into making fairly educated guesses about how a particular product might look if it were designed in the future, in say 2030? In other words, could a suitably trained AI give a laptop, car, or designer chair to be manufactured in 2020 the "design look of the 2030s" ten years early by extrapolating forward from the training dataset of past product designs?
AI still would have given us the Yugo. Sometimes, you just don't produce something good. AI will not change that.
People draw what they thing things will look like in the future all the time.
therefore an AI can too. Doesn't matter where you the the "I".
Of course a dumb AI will extrapolate all products that get smaller with time to a point.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Do we all just assume AI can do what mankind cannot?
tone
It doesn't matter what designs a person or an AI comes up with, because people will always want something new. Just like every generation goes on to develop new music or new movies even though it's a lot of the same chord progressions or plot lines, it's nevertheless something new. It doesn't matter if you extrapolate further ahead and give us a design ten years before its time. We'll still be tired of it five years down the road regardless of when the countdown starts.
A five year old design looks old because it's been around for five years. Even if you could make it look like it was designed five years from now (leaving aside material and manufacturing advances etc.), that won't change that you made it now, and in five years it will have been around for five years.
I hate to keep repeating "five years," but when you're explaining something astoundingly obvious I guess it's hard to avoid repeating yourself.
I thought the question about "what hasn't gone wrong" yesterday was just ordinary stupid cynicism, but this question confirms that dryriver is exceptionally stupid.
Human Taste changes. There is Nothing AI can do about that.
Men can create future-proof designs also. In fact, that's exactly how most everything was designed before planned obsolescence was invented in the beginning of the previous century, and consumers started to get brainwashed into wanting the new model of the year of things they already had in perfect working order by automobile manufacturers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Could AI vape global warming?
We have to obsolesce current product on regular basis. New product means a whole new sales cycle. If sales were restricted to replacement of worn out or damaged items sales would be a fraction of what they are now. We can’t have that. Investors won’t stand for it.
This question seems to hinge on the (almost certainly false) notion that design, and the perception of design, evolves in some trajectory that's independent of its context.
Things that look old do so in no small part because we can compare them with things that are new. Things that look cutting edge do so in part by rejecting design elements that look familiar.
Even if we assumed a scary good, probably better than human level, bot put to the task of inferring what "2020 thinks 2040 will look like" its output would, immediately, be part of 2020-era design, albeit probably a visually distinct flavor; and what 2040 actually look like would include reactions to, away from, against, with nostalgia for, etc. that "2040" design from 20 years ago.
When humans try this we get zeerust. It's not clear why a bot would do better; or that even an arbitrarily talented bot could beat the fact that the future it predicts will automatically become part of the past that the actual future evolves from(recursion is fun and unproblematic, right?).
There's also the problem, outside of some purely decorative objects or ones that aggressively try to defy the constraints of material culture(either trying to look more futuristic than the tech really is, like sci-fi TV props; or are deliberately throwbacks, like SCA longbows and stuff), that things look the way they do in no small part because of the constraints of technology that no amount of industrial designer resistance can get around.
The path of AI is fascinating. It already is giving us next years products today and that will get stronger and stronger. But there is no ultimate quality to a product. Although difficult better product can always be made. Sometimes game changers are not yet dreamed of. For example graphene and carbon fiber products are in their infancy and 15 years ago would not even be a question in one's mind. For example you might be producing the best canoe ever made but if carbon fiber is in your hands you can cut the weight of your canoe, make it difficult to damage and totally age resistant. But often it is the human will that fails and not the advancing technology. For example a row boat that is quite superior can be made from the same plastic that the common milk jug is made of yet almost no one has chose to do so. A very, very durable row boat that is lite in weight can be made from this type of plastic. Yet it just is not happening.
Maybe for an encore they can design some videogame AI companions who don't stand out in the open and get themselves shot like fucking idiots.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'd say it's a hard problem.
The visual design (shape) isn't the only factor for acceptance. It also has to do with features, price, popularity (yes, that's a chicken-and-egg thing), and how contemporary products compete on all those points.
Not only do you have the issue that new things become old (as others have pointed out), but there's also some resistance to things that look too different. Somewhat different is good, very different can be considered weird.
I think there's too much of a fad aspect to be able to predict much. It's a chaotic system.
- The Sigless Wonder
Can a woman buy just one pair of functional shoes? No. The answer is no. To even ask the question is just stupid.
There will never be just 'one' perfect design. Ever.
From the U of Helsinki:
Because AI is a discipline, you shouldn't say âoean AIâoe, just like we don't say âoea biologyâoe. This point should also be quite clear when you try saying something like âoewe need more artificial intelligences.âoe That just sounds wrong, doesn't it? (It does to us.)
And this is a stupid question. Apparently just add "Could an AI..." to anything moronic and it becomes news.
No you morons.
Because new is judged against the recently old.
Even if old is better rich people change their tastes to be separated from the masses. The masses follow and the rich move again.
Surely you know why puffy pants and cod pieces were popular for a time and the whole macaroni thing.
There are trend setters and trend followers, even the Walmart clothes you can get change in cut and fit based on fashion trends.
And it's all for serving our sexdrive and belief in the false economy of decorating our selfs for it. It is our unconscience worship.
that compute averages, which are plugged as coefficients in some equation derived from some theory created by a human brain. "The AI" cannot "create" or "destroy", it can only process the garbage in to produce garbage out. It will not become sentient, and it will not start a war with the humanity, these scenarios are also coming from books created by humans, in which they are a plot device that emphasizes some human trait or other.
Please stop anthropomorphising shit for no reason at all.
No!
There's no such thing as 'future proof' just like there's no such thing as 'a standard' -- or at the very least a 'standard' only exists until it becomes inconvenient to someone, who them breaks the standard to accomplish what they want, then so much for the 'standard' being a 'standard' anymore.
Also, so-called 'AI' is completely incapable of one vital ingredient: human creativity. Very often human ingenuity and creativity has no rhyme or reason to it, it's seemingly random, and very often astonishing, and that's one of the qualities that defines us. No 'AI' is really capable of this, so far as I've ever seen; all attempts at 'AI art', for instance, are just hideously derivative.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting more than a little sick of hearing about 'AI' this and 'AI' that, when this half-assed excuse for 'AI' that keeps being trotted out to us like it's something New and Fresh and Innovative is really Old and Busted and really not very good. 'AI', as it currently sits, is 20% fat content ground round (cooked well, to the point of being cardboard), versus the human brains' Filet Mignon (medium rare, of course). They'll both feed you, but honestly which would you rather have? I'll get excited over 'AI' when we can figure out how the little things like 'consciousness' and 'cognition' and 'personality' actually work, so we can create analogues of that in hardware and actually be able to converse in a very real freeform way with a real AI. What we have currently isn't even as smart as an amoeba.
an infinite number of AIs, all drawing a possible future will inevitably draw something that ends up happening, huh?
1) totally not a haystack problem. for sure.
2) service availability of 'an infinite number of AIs' is ironically limited.
This question is going into an example bin for computer science students.
It's not only one of the most ill conceived, sales-outcome driven technical questions i've ever heard, it's exactly the kind of compound misconception they'll have inflicted on them daily in the workplace.
No, you don't get a say in it. If you're lucky i'll take your name off and you wont be taunted by children.
AI would too. wtf?
If we play this inane game, and chuck out the reason why things change, better materials enabling broader approaches to design, minituration, etc. and just focus on aesthetics, then only an AI that is used once, and all other AI use stops after (like actual human visionaries), then yes.
But that is about as likely to happen as the hype around AI dying down before someone gets one person or worse, a huge group of people, killed.
We can 3D print metal parts and actually produce incredible art with it (Bathsheba Grossman) and have for some time. But how many people see it in their daily lives?
The salespeople have oversold too much stuff for far too long. It's about time for a huge recogning and AI is going to be the horse it rides in on, imo.
Could an AI realize that blue or white LEDs on everything is awful? Apparently human designers can't.
But red is so yesterday. Blue is new. Even though it looks awful and is horribly harsh in a darkened room, gotta have the new stuff.
Tits.
The existence of the halting problem affirms that even in an entirely deterministic system, one can fabricate an outcome that no amount of cognition within that system can predict with accuracy, effectively making it non-deterministic.
So, no... it will not. At best, it may end up being statistically better at it than humans are, but in the end, it will still just be guesswork.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Really!
We should put all our effort into a time machine. Once that is done we just leap to the time when what we want has already been done.
Or perhaps the deeper question is why the Slashdot editors thought anyone would be interested. Let me strain my brain a bit...
(1) Future-proof software. It's called upgrades.
(2) Future-proof goods and services. It's called people, as in people don't actually change that much.
(3) Future-proof fashions. Only if advertising is outlawed.
Question over-answered.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As a Design Engineer, if you make something "future proof" it implies there is wasted cost on contingency baggage that's unused in design. As a CYA, as a shot gun approach or otherwise: its a sign of poor design. It makes things bigger, hotter, more expensive and less reliable. With only rare exception, its value to your customer is never worth what it costs you.
I think an AI can learn to mimic poor design. They pretty much do that now.
The future will always be different from today, so you cannot design something today that will be the same as in the future. So insinuating that AI might be able to do this demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of AI and of time.
I think what machine learning could potentially do is identify which aspects of a design are timeless, and iterate designs based on that. For example, some people would say that the DeLorean still has a certain allure even to this day, even if Back to the Future hadn't popularized it. Shiny and metal has staying power. New DeLorean cars are being made and are expected to sell for over $100K, with nearly the same external design from almost *40* years ago. There are certain timeless design aspects that the Audi TT, Porsche 911, VW bug all have in common, and the same could be said of the Mercedes Benz G-class, Land Rover Defender, Jeep, and Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40. Generally these designs all evolved much slower than their trendier counterparts. I would surmise that the faster a design changes with time, the less timeless it is. A good example of this is the Apple iMac vs the MacBook Pro. The iMac went from a brightly-colored CRT design to a Luxo lamp design, to a flat white LCD screen, to a metal shell flat screen, all in the course of a decade. It was the antithesis of timeless until it settled on the current design that it has used for the last decade. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, still looks quite similar to the titanium PowerBook G4 it was based on, which debuted nearly 20 years ago. I think a better question to ask is whether machine learning could devise a new timeless design, or whether it would be stuck iterating on previous designs that are already generally considered to be timeless. I think if the former started to happen, we'd start seeing a lot more works of art going up for auction that were created by a machine. We're not really there yet, as AI artwork is still more of a novelty than an exhibit of timeless design.
Some designs from the past are better than modern designs.
One of design's goals is to make that thing from 5 years ago feel old. AI would probably pick up on the cyclical nature of design (like the waist height of jeans) but would not be able to pick up on the *improvements* that help product design which are the things that *actually* make things sell.
Go to Europe and look at a 500 year-old chair: How do you know it's a chair? Go to Italy and look at a 2000 year-old chair (or drawing thereof). Does it look a chair? Form follows function and function is limited by the human body. Products age because humans can make smaller, faster, lighter, more reliable (?), more popular, more natural UI products than they did previously.
This could be the dumbest question Iâ(TM)ve seen in a while. The best AI could do is speed up the fad cycle. Itâ(TM)s not magic. At the end of the day there is an element that is literally about being different than what was before. AI doesnâ(TM)t counter that.
Almost all of the comments on this article say "no".
So I'll play Devil's advocate and say, in particular way.
Picture a house from the 1970s. Laughable style, right?
Yet Mount Vernon is stylish almost 300 years after it was built, and always has been. The Supreme Court building is impressive architecture almost two THOUSAND years after the design was first built. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... )
In other areas of fashion and style, Levi's 501 jeans look as good today as they did 150 years ago. The two-button dark navy suit is timeless, and the Burberry trench coat.
A 20-year old Ford F-150 doesn't look outdated at all. Even a 30-year old model doesn't look particularly out of place today, it simply looks like a truck.
AI could very easily figure "these designs have been stylish for 200 years, they just might remain stylish for another 10 or 20 years".
PhantomFive asked "Indeed, how do you predict fads?" Perhaps you choose *style* over *fads*. We've all seen people ask questions like:
How do I use wget to read and reply to my daily email?
The answer, of course, is that there are plenty of very good ways to read, sort, and reply to email. Wget isn't one of them.
"How can you predict fads" [in order to look stylish in 10 years], is not the question, perhaps. Perhaps, in order to look stylish in 10 years, pay no attention to trends. Look stylish by being stylish, not by monkeying a tad, current or predicted.
Having said all of that, it does occur to me that several of today's 14-year old pop stars will be 19 year old pop stars in five years, when their fans are 19 and spending money at the mall. The best / most popular will still be popular in 10 years, when their fans, now in the mid-twenties, will have developed had a lot of their style tastes that they'll carry as a base for their aesthetic for decades after. Looking at the styles popular with 12-15 year olds MIGHT give some good hints about the styles those kids will still like ten years from now, after removing certain things like any particular bold color that is currently popular with kids. Particular bold colors come and go, of course.
Fashion is a chaotic process like weather. If we can't predict the weather more than 10 days ahead, why would we be able to predict fashion?
If your question can readily be answered with "no", it's a bad question.
Design has long since stopped being about functionality, and is now more about the latest trend. And trends aren't logical, they are driven by marketing to increase sales.
The question is literally "Can AI solve the halting problem?"
This is because, wouldn't any hypothetical "futureproof" product then be surpassed by the AI working more to create an even more futureproof product? At what point do you stop, do you ever stop?
Thus, the question becomes "can AI solve the halting problem" and the answer is, no you dumbass, the halting problem is undecidable and is the very math problem that helped create the modern notion of the computer in the first place. The problem that answered "no you can't solve this no turing machine can."
a neural network is intelligent the way that a calculator is intelligent or a sorting algorithm is intelligent.
When AI comes, our perception of products is not relevant, as they will make stuff for themselves.
Hopefully the AI will be our friends.
The current mis-use of the AI to mean something other than passing the Turing test
just assumes that AI will never come, and we will just have neural networks coming up with efficient solutions forever.
AI can only come from an self adaptive system, not the neural network in box special purpose systems we have now.
A milion monkeys typing on keyboards, even if they know how to create neural network software, will not create "AI".
The past is not like the future.
A list of winning lottery numbers, ordered by date. It's easy to find the numbers which won in the past. Easy to predict statistical properties of the numbers in the future. But their actual values is a million dollar mystery.
The same for popular music, easy to find sheet music for the chorus of the #1 popular song for every year. Hard to predict which particular combination of notes, and which order they will fall.
This is chaos theory. The output is sensitive to initial conditions.
The same for design, design parameters which have been successful in the past are inputs. For the future, broad scope, and broad trends, are in fairly predictable, but the details are hidden in the chaos.
Separate function from outlook. Make the outlook like a skin that you can change. Make economy around skins that appease. Engineering underneath just works, for 100 years :D - I wish...
the physical design or "look" of the product tends to age badly in our perception as newer products are released.
Because marketing assholes bombard 'us' with messages that newer is better end we need to buy it yesterday. Interpreting perceptions are taught and unfortunately most people learn from the wrong people.
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Obviously not. Most likely in 10, 20 years we will not even have the same products. Think how many products were replaced by the smart phone. If in 10, 20 years we have working neural lace then smartphones themselves would likely no longer be relevant. Also think how much cell phones changed from funky bricks to today's smartphone. No way looking at designs up to the funky bricks could anything, no matter how smart make a future proof brick that was relevant.
AI is not magic. There is no magic.
The person asking the question seems to have NO IDEA how a product is designed. Seems to infer that the end result is the 3d triangles of the final CAD model. A product passes through various phases before the release and takes into account factors that cannot be expressed numerically. Analysis of human needs, aesthatics, current trends, designer intent, fashion, style are ideas that get lost when the final 3d model is produced. Also the success of a product depends largely of the billions that are spend on marketing and ads. So how on earth will an AI reverse engineer a 3d model back to all these things?
They key word is "consumer". Consumer products are designed to be consumed/last a short time and be thrown away so that they need to be re-bought repeatedly.
They are meant to be cheap and disposable.
Trying to make consumer product last can result in only one of two things:
Either the product remains cheap and manufacturer makes less money because of less frequent re-purchases with the same profit,
or the price skyrockets and the product becomes too expensive to buy and undercut by less durable but cheaper competition, nobody buys it and manufacturer makes less money.
Then there is Apple who tries to make disposable products that do not last at prices 5x too high and priced itself out of the market :)
1950s: Microelectronics will solve everything!
1970s: Computers will solve everything!
1990s: The Internet will solve everything!
2010s: Big Data will solve everything!
2020s: Artificial Intelligence will solve everything!
2030s: Quantum Computing will solve everything!
My prediction for the 2040s: There will still be plenty shit left unsolved.
AI could conceivably come up with an optimal design for a product but the author seems to want something else - a subjective 'beauty'? It's unlikely that a computer would design a commuting car that is not aerodynamic for example, unless a human adjusted some weightings somewhere... wonder what that slider would say? 'Pimp Factor'?
When we have an Artificial General Intelligence, it won't need us, therefore, its opinion about our fashion choices are moot.
Design 101: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
The only way to create a design that is "in" forever is to make the beholder static. Peoples tastes will forever fluctuate...
One thing where no AI can help you is that design also depends on technological advances. Most of the stuff that's designed and produced today likely could not be produced several years ago. Hence no one came up with the design in the first place. Or a designer might have been able to design the visual aspects but that does not help if the design is not technically feasible. Smartphones are the best example for this but I think it also applies to cars and lots of other stuff.
Yesterday gave birth to Today and Today will give birth to Tomorrow, not next-tomorrow. So, if AI creates a seemingly next-tomorrow, that next-tomorrow is automatically seen as tomorrow and this leads leaves next-tomorrow still blank. NERDS WILL UNDERSTAND this simple logic. Therefore the answer is 'It's Impossible'.
How about you actually create an AI, and then get back to me?
"AI" as touted today everywhere doesn't exist! Say it again together: THERE IS NO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Complex if/then loops with dynamically corrected weighting is not the same as actual creative intelligence.
Asking if an AI could do it is semantically equivalent to asking "Could Unicorns do it?" because both of them are today imaginary things.
-Styopa
We still fly B52s from the 60s and F15s from the 70s. Let me know when a future proof AI airplane outlasts one of those.
"AI", what we have of it (which does really not deserve the name) cannot do better than smart humans when judgements are required. In fact, it does much worse. Stop with the quasi-religious belief in "AI"already. The only thing automation (which is all we have) can do is make standardized decisions that are significantly worse than those of a smart human, but do so much faster and much cheaper. For many things, this is enough. But it does in no way allow a better quality of the decisions or new insights.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Reading the summary about how designs look dated after a few years, to me it is like reading about a theological argument within a religion I never heard of. The claims made are completely alien to me, have no reflection in my own experience. I don't think products a few years old look dated. I don't think newer products look sleeker or more sophisticated. Often I think they look stupid and annoying. Can AI make that stop?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Design with integrity is the intangible underlying success
Fashion integrates the past. The 2020 design incorporates the 2019 design, the 2018 design, the 2017 design, etc...
If we get the 2030` design in 2020, then we will get the 2040` design in 2021, etc. By the time 2030 gets here, no one would ever actually design the 2030` design because the 2029 design, the 2028 design, etc were changed. The actual 2030 design will bear no resemblance to the old 2030` design.
(Those ticks should represent "prime", which I don't think I can do properly here on slashdot.)
See that "Preview" button?
Thermonuclear war is futureproof.
Duh.
There would have to be AI, first, and there isn't. Software can't 'design' anything. You all are beginning to remind me of the pimply faced teenagers of the 90s making proclamations about what they would do when they lived in the 'virtual world' that was right around the corner. There will never be artificial intelligence, just software.
Could An AI Conceivably Create Futureproof Product Designs?
My CS is rusty, but I'm sure this is homomorphic to the problem of creating a program that can tell if another program is going to halt with the right value (ergo, mathematifucking impossible.)
But beyond that, in the general sense, headlines starting with a question must be answered with a categorical "no." Damn writers need to do a bit better with their homework.
Fashion is about change for changes sake. It's not about finding an optimal solution, it's about showing you have the latest thing. It's less about functionality and more about novelty.
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
Umm, you know the Parthenon was Greek, not Roman?
So NN AIs, just reduce predictive error over the data set. It doesn't create anything novel, it just learns to mimic. It can't invent Van Gogh's style, but it can mimic it and apply it to something else.
So if you feed in all the things from the past and feed them the modern version in, you'll get the meta narratives:
1. More use of plastic.
2. Physically smaller, lighter, less material used.
3. More fragility as designs get tuned to minimize in-warranty repairs and maximize out-of-warranty issues.
4. Increased ease of manufacture & higher yield rates
These are things you already expect. Only that last one, "ease", is the one where magic happens. Since future manufacturing techniques limit what we produce today. It's not really predictable though, so it's where the "magic" happens. But that does follow the same meta narratives.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
One area where AI can shine is software development. Human intuition and guidance is needed to design a really useful application. However, the thousands of things that need to be just right under the hood for the application to be bug free, secure, and bulletproof could be effectively managed by an AI. Fantastic applications that have been around for decades still have faults and vulnerabilities unearthed because the humans can't rigorously think through all the interactions and idiosyncrasies. An AI can meticulously go through the code in a way that would take a human-only team a long long time. How great would (insert favorite OS here) be if the security and usability features were consistently baked in at the deepest levels?
If the "design of 2030" is produced in 2020, then it is the design of 2020, not 2030.
... depictions, the tall buildings, flying cars, and "swooshing" doors are all stupid-looking.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
No amount of intelligence can solve an unsolvable problem.
No amount of data will allow you to predict the future.
The best model in the world breaks down quickly because of the laws of mathematics that are laid out in Chaos theory.
"Small variances that cannot be accounted for make huge changes in actual results over time."
It is the same as predicting the weather. The only way to have enough data to predict the weather reliably for more then a few weeks out is to know the position , speed and temperature of all the atmospheric gases and their influencer's ( aka every object on the earth) from the current time until the time you want to predict. In other words omniscience.
If you want to understand look up hurricane modeling. Is there room for AI to help improve some of these predictions? I don't see why not, but you are limited in your predictions by the account and accuracy of your data. Which is in tern limited by your ability to gather and process that data.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
..what if a car that looks like a Ford Model T is suddenly "cool" in 2030?
Not to mention "Cool" is frequently manipulated by the marketeers "We'll let you know what you are going to like!".
The assumption that future designs are a learnable linear extrapolation from previous designs is questionable. As designs have occasional generational, non linear discontinuities. And fads and fashion details like color are discontinuous. Think avocado bathroom fixtures.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
I think we should go with long sleeve collared blouses and shirts buttoned all of the way up, and long pants and skirts. Keep it simple.
And I am not joking either. There is a reason this basic fashion has spread all over the world, and is holding strong even long after the fall of European Imperialism.
If it looks right for 10 years from now, it isn't going to look right now. The product would fail. Many products fail because they are ahead of their time.
Pantheon! Damn spell checker.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is quite possibly the dumbest question on slashdot in awhile. And that's saying something.
Designs have a shelf life. Of course you can't make something look like it's ten years ahead. It will either look weird and out of place now, so no one will want it. Or it will become popular and everyone will copy it now, and in ten years time will look dated.
The fundamental issue is that design is a fad. It lurches from one position to another like a drunker sailor. Not only is it unpredictable across large time scales. Any design has a limited shelf life by definition. It's new and exciting for a short awhile, then it's normal, then it's passe, then it's old and dated. It doesn't matter what you come up with. You can't be fresh and exciting across decades. The question is pure nonsense.
On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable task to give to an AI. But here's the thing to remember: AI is not magic. It is a nifty trick for finding a mathematical formula for something. If there is no formula underlying it, an AI can't learn it. Hence, no one can use AI to predict the lottery numbers.
So, is there a mathematical formula for popular whim? Well, there is a formula for the way the brain works, so in theory, it should be possible. However, when you look at what goes into that formula, the odds of pulling off what you are proposing drops dramatically.
What is popular rides a knife's edge between what is familiar and what is novel. If it is too familiar, it is boring. If it is too novel, it is scary. It has to find the balance in order to be popular. But there's the rub: What is familiar is constantly changing. That's also why "what is old is new again" happens: because the key elements have not been seen in so long that they start to become novel again.
What is being proposed is a little bit like a temporal paradox: The very act of creating a popular product changes the consciousness of the population, rendering their predictions unable to stand the test of time simply because they were seen sooner rather than later.
That's not to say that there isn't value in using machine learning to build models of good design and aesthetics. There most certainly is.
But you probably won't design a product that will still be in vogue 10 years from now, because if the product is too different from today, it won't be popular, and if it is popular, it will change the trajectory of what is popular in 10 years. You can't win. Not in that particular game, anyway.
You CAN, however, use it to identify the elements of good style, and combine it with a generative model to create designs. And there is a way of probing a model to create novelty, which can be used to explore the solution space. That could be a very profitable way to generate an endless supply of "fresh, desirable designs."
Google the Studebaker Avanti this car. When it came out in the 1960s it was panned by the entire world as boxy and ugly and it helped kill the manufacturer. By 1980 every single car being produced was even boxier and even uglier than the Avanti and everyone loved it and no one complained and Avantis even became hip and collectible because here was a 60's car that looked like an 80s car.
Product design is flame. Humans don't want to stand out and like whatever they are told by enough influencers they are supposed to like. This is why everyone has stainless steel appliances even though stainless steel is horrible to keep clean and what the hell is actually so attractive about stainless over a matte black that wont show off every last greasy fingerprint?
Its all marketing that sells a product.
I doubt this will work, but it may actually advance the field of AI in an interesting way.
One way to describe an intelligent person is to consider if they can look at a situation and predict the outcome. But, there are multiple ways to come to that conclusion. A person can look at socialism and determine that the end result is totalitarianism. Was the determination arrived at by looking at the history of socialist attempts. Or, did the person construct a logical model of human interactions and see the logical conclusion?
It is the second method that is more robust and would be described as intelligent or wise, vs the former which would be considered "educated"(?)/"trained"(?). There is no indication that it does, but I would think that the AI would have to be trained on the merging of trends instead of dictionary data, which would be a great advancement in all the AI I've ever seen.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No.
Nobody, person or AI, can do it. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that someone does make an AI capable of accurately predicting future styles. They then use this in 2020 to release a design which is from 2030. The mere act of doing this will then make others copy this new style so the effect is that the 2030 designs will be introduced in the early 2020's. Hence by 2030 things will be different to what was predicted back in 2020 because by releasing the 2030 designs earlier you have changed how styles will evolve.
In addition to this, there are non-evolutionary changes that cannot be predicted because there is no pattern to extrapolate. For example, it is very unlikely that anyone extrapolating designs of mobile phones prior to 2007 would have accurately predicted what a phone today would have looked like because in 2007 the iPhone came out and everyone's designs changed.
This is more about fashion. The retro futurism is in at one time and curves and bulges the next.
As soon as you try to predict it too far out, it then looks to weird for today.
Who would have predicted cut out shoulders when padded shoulder were in?
What will women be wearing next year, naked sleeves or swing back to studded shoulders?
Will back or neon colors be in?
You just described the perfect clothes for Europe and the top half of N.America but certainly not for Australia, South East Asia, Africa or the Middle East.