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Machine Learning From Las Vegas

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 Volume 49 The Rational City  4

THEORIES
M. Christine Boyer
Editorial  2

Out of the Loop  7

HELLO
WORLD!

Doug Spencer

On Automation in The Stack 

Benjamin H. Bratton
11

Architecture After the Event Horizon  15

Kazys Varnelis

Demo Life  17
HISTORIES THE ANTHROPOCENE
Orit Halpern TELLS US THAT OUR
TECHNOLOGIES
Hausbaumaschine  22
ARE CHANGING THE
PLANET; BUT WHAT
Nader Vossoughian ARE THEY DOING
TO US?
The Ultimate Industrial Revolution  27
W J McKee

Welcome to FutureLand  33
Victor M. Sanz

Animated Aberrations, Rebellious Objects  39

Shannon Mattern

Robots on Screen  44
Volume
STRATEGIES

The Smart City of Gaza  81

Francesco Sebregondi

We, Robots  85
Kas Oosterhuis
In Loving Support  49
Insert Social Physics and Democratic Suprematism  89
Philippe Morel

The Promethean Gift Economy  92

Troy Conrad Therrien

Machine Learning from Las Vegas  98

Pierre Cutellic
TACTICS

Machinic Apprenticeship  102

Sara Dean and Etienne Turpin

Domestic Machines  108

Nicholas Korody

Drive  111
Carla Leitão and Ed Keller

Here and Anywhere in the World  117

Volume 49

Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds

Colophon  128
Where the City Can’t See  121
Tim Maughan and Liam Young
1

V49_BW_26AUG16_V8-TO DK.indd 1 30/08/16 12:26

 PIERRE CUTELLIC
he relevant revolution today is the current
T ARCHITECTURE
electronic one. Architecturally, the symbol
systems that electronics purveys so well are
STRATEGIES
MACHINE
LEARNING
FROM
LAS VEGAS
more important than its engineering content.
The most urgent technological problem facing
us is the humane meshing of advanced scien­
tific and technical systems with our imperfect
and exploited human systems, a problem
worthy of the best attention of architecture’s
scientific ideologues and visionaries.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour,
0Learning from Las Vegas
It is almost always relevant to put the emer­
gence of significant architectural discourses
in perspective of other contemporary societal
events, particularly since the latter tend to become
a pre-text of the former. But what happens if such
events fail to meet their own expectations? We
might then find ourselves in front of a sign of the
times yet to come, or a Zeitgeist in the making.
In parallel to the release of Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s revelation
of the Information Age’s consequences on both
the built environment and modern ideologies, the
then-promising field of artificial intelligence (AI) fell
into an ice age for almost a decade.1 Research­ers
were facing the very problem of not being able
to realize their own ambitions, both conceptually
and technically. The great initial excitement of both
researchers and financial backers brought about
V49_BW_26AUG16_V8-TO DK.indd 98
THE DATA-SATURATED
ENVIRONMENT WE LIVE IN TODAY
WAS ALREADY THERE ALMOST
HALF A CENTURY AGO; IT’S JUST
THAT THE NATURE OF DATA HAS
CHANGED. DATA USED TO BE
MUCH MORE SPATIAL, MORE
ARCHITECTONIC, AND THE MEANS
OF LOCATING ONESELF IN, AND
NAVIGATING THROUGH, SUCH A
SPACE COULD BE REVEALED BY
ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AND
CRITIQUE. WITH DATA ONLY
PENETRATING DEEPER INTO OUR
COGNITIVE REALM BY THE DAY,
WHAT IS THERE FOR
TO SAY?
by the developments of neural nets, for example,
was abruptly interrupted by Marvin Minsky and
Seymour Papert’s 1969 book Perceptrons, which
revealed important limitations on what and how
a machine, as one could be conceived at the time,
could actually learn.2 Most of the barriers encoun­
tered were directly related to the challenge of pro­
cessing vast quantities of data. Problems such
as memory or processing speed and the necessity
of having datasets to learn from were all linked
to the same issue of acquiring and processing
a constantly increasing amount of data. Most of
those issues were overcome in the 1980s by new
generations of computers, models and methods
for neural nets such as the Neocognitron and Back­
propagation,3 but these developments remained
intimately linked and limited by the ability to pro­
cess and evaluate increasingly larger datasets.
A symptomatic form of this phenomena can be seen
in the overwhelming communication system
described by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour
as Las Vegas’ architecture and urbanism:
“It is an architecture of communication over
space; communication dominates space
as an element in the architecture and in the
landscape.”
Volume 49
It is very rare that architectural thinking finds
itself ahead of its own time. But with regards to the
“humane meshing of technological and human 98
30/08/16 12:27
 systems” they were clearly addressing the tip
of a crisis we have come to face only now. The then-
symbolic crisis they addressed was one of the
earliest symptoms of a general crisis of knowl­
edge impairment. Las Vegas served as a tangible
proof that, with the evolution of human activities,
communication would come to dominate space
in an ambient manner, conveying increasingly vast
quantities of data from which the production
of knowledge would become increasingly difficult.
Machine learning – the mechanization of knowl­edge
acquisition from experience – has come to act as
a response to this issue, but rather than considering
a “humane meshing”, tends to work as a substitution
for human cognition. Total knowledge – how to do,
to live and think – has nowadays fully achieved
its mechanization.4 And such an integral mechani­
zation has also generated a progressive dependency
towards technology as well as a general inca­pacity
to understand technological environments. The
Las Vegas citizen’s car became essential to navi­
gate through the symbolic and sign systems made
for high-speed recognition, and both rendered
the unmediated person impaired to experience
and understand his immediate surroundings. Spatial
alienation due to lack of mediation became the
pervasive architectural paradox of Las Vegas, and
eventually, our daily lives. Such foresight was
already manifest of a new kind of knowledge impair­
ment, one that is conveyed through the mechani­
zation of acquisition and production of information.
But could this substitution mechanism be
approached from a new angle, this condition
of impairment seen in a new light?
Delays in AI-related technological develop­
ments offered a time window for the development
of an extended architectural thinking of such pro­
gressing events. Nicholas Negroponte, founder
of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, published
two books at around the same time as Venturi,
Scott Brown and Izenour’s study of Las Vegas:
The Architecture Machine in 1970, and Soft Archi­
tecture Machines in 1975.5 Negroponte laid out
an anticipatory plan to technological advance­
ments and a synthetic approach for architecture.
One of the many critical aspects of this work has
been to highlight the ethical and ontological issues
faced by AI research: the discrimination between
artificial and natural cognition. “To the first machine
that can appreciate the gesture”, Negroponte
autographed the first book. Within these two books
is a progressive roadmap for a collaborative envi­
ronment between humans and machines, where
Volume 49
one cognitive system does not necessarily discrimi­
nate against or substitute the other.
At around the same time, in 1976, one of the
99 first significant pieces of writing on AI ethics was
V49_BW_26AUG16_V8-TO DK.indd 99
published: Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power
and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation.6
This influential work was the first to propose a com­
prehensive ethical differentiation between decision-
making and choice – with the former defined
as the product of computational activity and the
latter of human judgment – and would eventually
pave the way for the evolution of artificial knowl­
edge. But this very discrimination, which is still
operative today, remains an obstacle to truly envi­
sion a positive outcome of integral mechanization,
as human cognition and knowledge production
remain separated from each other and mediated
by artificial knowledge.
In 1965, scientists discovered peculiar types
of neurosignals involved in the process of decision-
making.7 Then, at the beginning of the 1970s, novel
methods to monitor the electrical activity of the
brain like ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEGs) became
more portable, allowing them to expand from the
fields of psychiatric and medical research and
eventually deliver the first brain-computer inter­
faces, paving the way for neuroprosthetics.8 With
the invention of brain-computer interfaces, electric
signals could convey information between biologi­
cal and mechanical material, constituting a symbiotic
technium in favor of human re-capacitation.
Neuroscience and neurotechnology could then
combine human and mechanized cognitions
SEIGETARTS
to reproduce an interface necessary for a body
to interact with its environment, acquire information
and produce knowledge. Here, one can realize
that within the field of neuroscience the develop­
ments of cognitive science and artificial intelli­
gence are deeply linked. But aside from medical
applications, where disabilities tend to be immedi­
ately observable, not a single positive integrative
approach has emerged from new technological
developments to propose a solution to general
knowledge impairment. Rather, the most effective
applications have been for military or marketing
purposes.9 But just like how the mechanization
of labor in the automotive and airspace industries
served as productive models for the development
of modern architecture, perhaps the medical indus­
try can now serve as a model for the cognition
of architecture: a heuristic graft for new values of
knowledge (as is the function of neuro­prosthesis).10
In the medical realm one can observe people
subject to such successful surgical operations
regain lost control of their motor skills and psyche.
Scientific research has developed applications
capable of returning haptic control to those who
had lost it, not just with bionic devices but also
by assisting in the progressive reconstruction
of motor nerves and the deceleration of neuro­
degen­erative diseases.11 Human re-capacitation
30/08/16 12:27
 ASPEN MOVIE MAP APPLICATION AND INTERFACE,
Architecture Machine Group, MIT, 1978.
STRATEGIES

Volume 49

A QUADRIPLEGIC WOMAN CONTROLLING A ROBOTIC ARM in three dimensions

through a BCI, UPMC, 2012. 100 1

V49_BW_26AUG16_V8-TO DK.indd 100 30/08/16 12:27

 is a process of re-valuing knowledge of the human
body and the way it interacts with and controls its
environment. Augmented by the computational
powers of AI and other artifacts of integral mechani­
zation, the re-capacitation of human knowledge
seems approachable, now more than ever. And
such a graft, previously applied to bodies only
clinically diagnosed as disabled, should be con­
sidered in general more seriously.
One peculiar justification for cognitive com­
puting today is to propose an extension to human
cognition.12 But the current state of scientific
research rather tends to develop applications
of the opposite scenario, where human cognition
helps and extends the artificial one (such as in the
case of ‘attribute learning’, where attributing values
to symbolic systems still remains as a highly
demanding and complicated task for cognitive
machines). The curiosity of such a common state­
ment cannot be undermined while human cognition
is just about to reveal an extraordinary potential
to positively relink with automation. Whether the
evolution of architecture lies in tangible artifacts
or extremely simulated environments, the next
steps of extended, augmented cognition should
be integrated with human cognition, as in neuro­
technologies, in such ways that maintaining
a humane meshing along with technological
shifts would allow for the construction of novel
types of knowledge and development of new
crea­tive processes. From the Miocene to the
Anthropocene, the human brain, along with the
human body and its sensory organs, has had
about eight million years to evolve. Elements
of that process of evolution, such as visual cog­
nition, which serves as a mentoring model for
machine vision and data compression, are being
factored in to the development of artificial intel­
ligence.13 When thinking about the future of knowl­
edge and the evolution of architecture we should
learn to see ourselves as a more integral part
of the machine learning agenda and consider
factoring it into human evolution with greater
care and creativity.

1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott
Brown and Steven Izenour,
Learning From Las Vegas
(Cambridge (MA)/London: MIT
Press, 1972).
2 Marvin Minsky and Seymour
Papert, Perceptrons: An Intro­
duc­tion to Computational
Geometry (Cambridge (MA)/
London: MIT Press, 1969).
3 Kunihiko Fukushima, ‘Neo­
cognitron: A self-organizing
neural network model for a
mechanism of pattern
recognition unaffected by shift in
position’, Biological Cybernetics,
36(4), 1980, pp. 93–202. Ravid E.
Volume 49
4 Bernard Stiegler, La Société
Automatique 1, Le Futur du Travail
(Paris: Fayard, 2015).
5 Nicholas Negroponte, The
Architecture Machine: Toward a
More Human Environment
(Cambridge (MA/London: MIT
Press, 1970). Nicholas Negroponte,
Soft Architecture Machines
(Cambridge (MA)/London: MIT
Press, 1975).
6 JosephWeizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human
Reason: From Judgement To
Calculation (San Francisco: H.
Freeman & Company, 1976).
7 Steven J. Luck, An Introduc­
cation’, Annual Review of Bio­
physics and Bioengineering, 1973.
9 For an example of DARPA
military applications of Brain-
Computer-Interfaces see: Robbin
A. Miranda et al, ‘DARPA-funded
efforts in the development of
novel brain–computer interface
technologies’, Journal of Neuro­
science Methods 244, 2015,
pp 52–67. As for the field of
Neuro­marketing, one can trace
the mechanization of human
consumer behaviors to the
theoretical model from which it
derives: Gerald Zaltman’s
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation
SEIGETARTS
Proceedings of the 34th Annual
Conference of the Association
for Computer Aided Design
in Architecture (ACADIA),
23–25 October, 2014, pp. 473-478.
11 José del R. Millán et al,
‘Combining Brain–Computer
Interfaces and Assistive Tech­
nologies: State-Of-The-Art and
Challenges’, Frontiers in Neuro­
science, 4, 2010, pp. 161.
12 John E. Kelly III, ‘Computing,
Cognition, and the Future of Knowing,
How Humans and Machines are
Forging a New Age of Under­
standing’, IBM Research, 2015.
13 David Marr, Vision

Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton
and Ronald J. Williams, ‘Learning
representations by back-
propagating errors’, Nature 323,
0 101 Oct. 1986, pp. 533–536.
tion to the Event Related
Potential Technique, (Cambridge
(MA)/London: MIT Press, 2005).
8 Jacques J. Vidal, ‘Toward
direct brain-computer communi­
Technique (ZMET©).
10 Pierre Cutellic, Le Cube
d’Après, Integrated Cognition for
Iterative and generative Designs’,
ACADIA 14: Design Agency,
(Cambridge (MA)/London: MIT
Press, 1982). James V. Stone,
Vision and Brain: How We
Perceive the World (Cambridge
(MA)/London: MIT Press, 2012).

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