Ask Slashdot: Could An AI Conceivably Create Futureproof Product Designs? 163
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?
Still would get a Yugo (Score:3, Insightful)
AI still would have given us the Yugo. Sometimes, you just don't produce something good. AI will not change that.
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Hello, AI, which foul mouth has trained your instance for today?
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With advanced 3-cylinder engine so human workers have less engine work to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The Aztec's biggest sin really was just being ahead of it's time. It was pretty far out there for 2000, but if it came out today no one would give it a second look among all the other bizarre and ugly designs that are currently being made.
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Creating a timeless design that never needs updating is generally not in a businesses' best interest.
You mean like the typical blue suit?
Can a person do it? (Score:2)
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.
Nobody can do it (Score:2)
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A big part of the lower, wider, and longer thing was not just aesthetics, but because such a thing was finally possible. In the early days, cars had to be built to handle roads that were little more than dirt tracks, because a lot of roads were just dirt tracks. Even into the early 1950's it was still expected that a car would travel significant amounts of miles on dirt and gravel roads. It wasn't until the Interstate system was built that a car could now spend almost all its time on straight, smooth, fl
Is this the trend, then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we all just assume AI can do what mankind cannot?
What if AI posted slashdot articles? (Score:1)
Could AI vape global warming?
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dryriver seems to think Slashdot is his personal blog to post the idiocy he comes up when waking and baking.
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And why would business want it?
Business wants to sell you the "new shiny" every year or two.
They no longer want to build things to last. It would be good for the planet if we built things to last, but we can't seem to care enough about that.
Doomed to failure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Doomed to failure (Score:2)
AI can create stylish design, by not doing that (Score:3)
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... [wikipedia.org] )
In other areas of fashion and style, Levi's 501 jeans look as good today as they did 150 years ago. The two-but
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Picture a house from the 1970s. Laughable style, right?
No one's disputing that old stuff can look good or be useful. Second when new houses are build they're not built to look like houses from 1970 even though we're perfectly capable of doing that.
Yet Mount Vernon is stylish almost 300 years after it was built, and always has been.
Indeed some things are timeless. Timeless enough to replicate.
For example the mid century modern style of furniture is still in production today. You have to sometimes look quit
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It doesn't matter what designs a person or an AI comes up with, because people will always want something new.
In addition to the novelty factor, new products also depend on new scientific advances such as in materials science. Without today's batteries, LCD screens, processors, etc. you could not build a modern smartphone in 1990. The same goes for cars, TVs, refrigerators, etc.
If you look at things with little to no scientific advances, there is less need for new products. The wood furniture in my house does not look that much different than what my parents had, and in many cases were picked up at high end estate
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...but of course AI is also going to lead to the singularity so we won't have to wait for those advances we'll (or at least the AI) will have all of those advances at its disposal now! ;)
anyway.. The root of the article is presuming there is a "perfect" design that all designs are incrementally progressing towards. IF that were the case then sure you could "calculate" what that perfect design was and leapfrog to it BUT as many others have said in many other ways: What people want changes unpredictably, even
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You nailed it.
Stuff looks old because it has been around, not because it was designed a certain year.
Sufficiently good AI may be able to design something that looks good today, like a star designer. It will still age. Some things looks good even when old, but usually because it is a valuable item. Grandfathers gold watch, or a perfectly kept veteran car.
Perhaps an AI can become so advanced, it accurately predicts the design style 20 years into the future. So if you make such an item and keep it secret, it w
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I find that Microsoft's latest desktop looks a helluva lot like DesqView.
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Maybe it could, by analysing present day trends and extrapolating on them. And who's to say AI won't be responsible for changing them?
Statements about technology that include the words "No" and "Never" have often ended seeming silly in hindsight.
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This is a variation of the question about god and big rocks.
You can't future proof as long as there are new discoveries to be made. You can't predict scientific discovery, by definition. QED, you can't future proof.
You could extend product lifespans by forcing manufacturers to offer a transferable warranty which lasted a reasonable period. Way more than 90 days, that's for damned sure.
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To overcome the very limited life of the product, they created a new product each year and a fashionista mentality that you change your car like you change your clothes.
In Europe, cars were being made that last 30-100 years. However, American cars, devoid of quality control, were much cheaper, and as the market expanded rapidly, most buyers, even in Europe, were people who had never owned a car before, and
No need for an AI (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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We Can’t Have That (Score:2)
I'll go with 'no' (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [tvtropes.org]. 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.
Re: I'll go with 'no' (Score:2)
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to make a newline on /.
AI is a path and not a goal. (Score:2)
The state of AI (Score:2)
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.
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I'd be happy if Bethesda could just get them not to put their head into my line of fire and stop there.
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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.
But you don't want an AI companion in a game who's better than you.
"A good robot learns to read his owner's mind a little, to anticipate little wishes before they become commands. Naturally there's a limit. Too much anticipation scares people just as too much grinning and bowing does. Moderation is the key. Aim to be a smidgen less intelligent than your owner, but a lot more thoughtful. See everything as it affects your owner, and in no other way."
- John Sladek, "Tik-Tok"
Probably not (Score:3)
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.
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That is why God created "a woman's right to shoes".
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From the U of Helsinki: Because AI is a discipline, you shouldn't say "an AI", just like we don't say "a biology". This point should also be quite clear when you try saying something like "we need more artificial intelligences." That just sounds wrong, doesn't it? (It does to us.)
Why do you quote the University of Helsinki when they're dead wrong? Of course AI is a discipline, and the noun phrase is uncountable when referring to said discipline; however, it also serves as a countable noun meaning "something man-made which has intelligence". When we discuss whether Alexa, Google, etc. are expert systems or artificial intelligences, we're quibbling over definitions, but the grammar itself is fine. Finns should stick to Finnish, and being attractive, and programming AI - hands off my E
No (Score:1)
"The AI" is just a bunch of statistical methods (Score:3)
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.
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That thing is a /. editor, so it is probably just a buggy bash script.
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You make inferences about the whole population from the value of a sample size of one - your own. It is a very, very poor estimator.
The simple and direct honest answer. (Score:3)
No!
No such thing as 'future proof', so no. (Score:3)
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.
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Human creativity belongs to humans by definition. But AI creativity is not limited to human creativity. We have AIs that can imagine faces and scenes, invent new strategies in games and invent proteins to fit a specific function. AI's can even design deep neural nets to the same level of accuracy as the best human researchers, given enough compute. Creativity is just random search filtered through utility.
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Prove it. Rhetorical; you can't.
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Nobody has a handle on what creativity, imagination or consciousness are.
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Of course AI has creativity. In recent years we have seen an explosion of neural networks that generate images and videos from learned examples, and which are able to create novel imagery (original realistic faces, streets populated with objects, fill-in gaps in broken images...), with any novel combination of visual styles. If you ask me, that doesn't look much different from what many artists do, even in modern art.
(The most sophisticated networks are even capable of exploring the creation space and produ
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"Object X is able to create a product of type Y automatically" is anthropomorphizing now?
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It is obviously a bot programmed to make us complacent about the upcoming robot apocalypse.
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Yeah, the first part I had already figured out :-)
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The future is intrinsically unknowable (Score:2)
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.
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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.
And how does that apply to a computer, but not to a human?
The halting problem applies to all systems, natural or artificial.
AI != Magic (Score:5, Informative)
Really!
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Though I guess Clarke was referring to potential alien technology that was developed completely detached from ours.
Perhaps post-singularity "AI" will look completely alien to us, but that points to another problem: Current "AI" is a buzzword that has little to do with the "magic" of the original meaning, much like "hoverboard" and "android". So I would say no to anything promised by "AI", but I wouldn't rule out "things done on compute
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To our ancestors traveling at 70 mph would have seemed like magic.
However, AI != Omniscience and never will.
The predictive power of your model will always be limited by the amount of data you have , which will be limited by your ability to predict it. For any given topic AI might be able to make 'better' predictions by creating a better model, but even then they would be 'within a range of possibilities' not with absolute certainty.
What is the motivation of this question? (Score:2)
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.
But can an AI predict the weather a year from now? (Score:2)
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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.
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Can AI solve the halting problem? no (Score:2)
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
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The question is literally "Can AI solve the halting problem?"
Nonsense.
The halting problem concerns finding a general solution to the question "will this program ever halt?" that always works.
All the proposed fashion-prediction AI has to do is come up with statistical
fashion forecasts that are better than most human marketing managers.
a neural network is not Intelligent (Score:2)
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 net
Separation of concerns, please (Score:1)
no way (Score:2)
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.
It's a recurring trend (Score:2)
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.
What is the question? (Score:2)
Future = Past + Present (Score:1)
THEY DON'T EXIST (Score:2)
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.
Wat utter nonsense (Score:2)
"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.
I Must Already Be Future-Proofed (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
AI lacks INTEGRITY (Score:2)
Design with integrity is the intangible underlying success
The chain is eternal (Score:2)
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.)
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:2)
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.
maybe AI can decide the perfect hem length as well (Score:2)
Basically, 'Yes', but an uninteresting 'Yes' (Score:2)
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
AI Can Improve Software Design (Score:2)
In those "predictions of the future" ... (Score:2)
... depictions, the tall buildings, flying cars, and "swooshing" doors are all stupid-looking.
No. (Score:2)
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 , spee
Fundamental flaw with this approach. (Score:2)
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.
so, you make it and warehouse it for 10 years? (Score:2)
Probably not, and here's why (Score:1)
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 formu
Progress (Score:2)
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 l
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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.