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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Really!
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.
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.
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
Even more remarkable about the B-52: the program to build it started in 1947 and it first flew in 1952. It is expected to remain in service until at least 2050 at which time the design will be more than a century old and the youngest airframes would be 88 years old, with others being over 90.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age