During a colonoscopy, on the verge of fainting, I hear the doctor in a good mood, "Ah, there's the AI reporting, yes, there's something else I missed! Poof, it's gone!" That was a year ago. I've been told that 95% of AI research is about making people healthier and extending their lives.
One of my coworkers recently wrote a particularly elegantly worded protocol. He was assisted by a text generation model (Natural Language Processing). To our amusement, he asked Chat GPT of OpenAI whether Eike Becker uses populism as a stylistic device in his columns. The answer consisted of eloquently worded, friendly catchphrases.
Meanwhile, when designing an interior, we worked with AI and had it make suggestions based on room dimensions, budget, colors, styles, and furniture types.

We've been using AI-based technology called computer vision to develop fairly systematic apartment floor plans and create sugary visualizations. Today, that only partially meets our needs, but is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Using a text-to-image AI generator from Midjourney, DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, words become images in minutes. This can be done playfully. In all fields, I expect changes in the way we work. AI can piece together something from a sea of known and make it more efficient at breakneck speed. Machine learning is a good term for it. All tasks, whether rather boring or rather creative, will soon be processed with the support of AI.
In any case, the entire 25,000 laws, standards and rules that prescribe building in Germany are uploaded in no time. From this, many useful applications can again be derived.
The demands on architecture and urban planning are becoming ever higher, the tasks ever more complex, and the real estate industry is increasingly undermining these requirements. That's where we can make good use of AI support. Urban development, mobility, sustainability, density, social building, modular building, cradle-to-cradle, the organization of collaboration and approval processes might experience a big push due to AI and move forward for the benefit of all.

It will also be easier to develop high-rise cores, staircases, optimize the use of building materials, reduce steel and concrete, control technical systems more economically, and reduce technology in buildings. Through better analysis and optimization methods, there will be a significant reduction in mechanical technology. I call this Smartphone and Stupidhome. The real estate industry has not yet discovered the smartphone for itself and still thinks it's such a device for making phone calls.
The industry today is trying to cram buildings with 20th century technology and blow as much air as possible through shafts and ducts using fossil fuel energy. That's outdated. The immense amount of energy used to make and operate buildings has contributed significantly to the climate catastrophe. AI gives us new tools to bring about better solutions for an increasingly complicated world.
Yuval Noah Harari believes that we are being driven by a blind, technological evolution that cannot be stopped by anything or anyone. Evolution has no goals and is not an actor. So are we almost inevitably turning into an unimaginative, AI-dependent society and in the end abolishing ourselves? Are we experiencing the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene?

Or will we also succeed in developing new ethics in dealing with the new technology? And to shape and use these learning machines for the benefit of all.
Viktor Weber of Acquirepad inspired me to write this column. He fears, as most experts do, that the Googles, Microsofts, Tencents of this world will become so frantically smarter through AI that they will gain an uncatchable advantage. If he is right, I hope the U.S. and Europe unbundle these monopolies.
But things may turn out differently. Jürgen Schmidhuber, director at IDSIA, believes AI will soon be very cheap. So cheap that everyone will be able to afford this technology and then make it work for them on a variety of levels. I like that.
Just the chance that these new brooms could help us sorcerer's apprentices make the world a better place gives me hope.
Right now, I'm involved in the development of a software program: SOMA is designed to simplify and improve collaboration between building owners, architects, specialist planners and authorities. The program links protocols with schedules, to-do lists, invoices and makes everything transparent for those involved. And gives them more time for their actual tasks.
 
Who would like to participate?