Automation has become a major talking point—not only for its potential to replace countless low-income or low-skilled jobs, but also for its capacity to render entire professional careers obsolete through artificial intelligence and machine learning.
At ArchDaily, we opened the floor to this discussion in 2017 with an in-depth report on the subject, and we recently turned to our Instagram audience to ask what they think about automation. Do they believe it will affect them? Our readers seem confident: some argue that architecture is an art—or rather, a discipline centered on emotions—even if they overlook the standardization and modulation processes already established in the real estate market. According to those who responded to our poll, this emotional dimension inherent to architecture is precisely what makes it harder to automate.
While some studies support this view, figures like the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari challenge it. In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari argues that this uniquely human edge is precisely what we risk losing in this century.
