Brian Potter: prediction

Transcript context

…Gotcha. Okay. To the extent that it is part of the story, somebody left an interesting comment on one of Scott Alexander's posts about how modern construction looks different than older construction. This is a comment from fluffy Buffalo. He or she writes, “I think new technology should help a lot with 3D printers, CNC machines, robots, CAD, and AI. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a way to produce pleasing ornaments, murals, and building shapes at a reasonable price.” Then they go on, that no one is doing it because the current crop of architects can apparently only think in steel, concrete, and glass. So how plausible do you think this is? I think I read some of the comments on that post. I think one of the people mentioned that the Victorian style of house basically came about because of mass production methods, which made really ornate wood decorations really, really cheaply. They were just cranked out on some milling machine in a factory somewhere, then you could just buy them and place them in your house or whatever. So that style is basically a function of technology making that cheaper. That was in style for a while, but it’s not in style anymore because of the shifting sands of aesthetics. I think part of this is more broadly applicable. It's actually kind of a hassle to have all this ornamentation all over your house. On the inside, it's just lots and lots of stuff to dust and keep clean, which again comes back to cost disease. If you have servants to do that for you, it's fine. But if you don't have servants, it's you, and it creates a lot of extra work for you. Same on the exterior. But then also there is the issue that in general, you want your building to shed water and direct it away from the house as possible. If you have a lot of little nooks and crannies and ornamentation stuff for water to collect, that's pretty bad from a durability perspective. I would be careful not to over-index on that because obviously, people did build extremely durable, beautiful masonry brick buildings. It's not like that makes it impossible. But it is something to consider because on the margin, it probably does make your maintenance costs go up. Dwarkesh Patel Okay. Are you optimistic overall? Maybe not with these specific technologies, and maybe not with having ornamentation or something, but do you think that in a hundred years, the technology would enable the construction of buildings that look prettier than modern buildings, but are also more maintainable or at least as maintainable? Or is it basically going to be steel and glass towers for the time for the upcoming future? ldings that look prettier than modern buildings, but are also more maintainable or at least as maintainable? Or is it basically going to be steel and glass towers for the time for the upcoming future? Yeah, that's a good question. There's a lot of enthusiasm. Some of it is architecture. So we'll see how well it actually gets adopted. But for timber and large tall buildings made out of heavy timber elements, I don't know if that’s partially it's an aesthetic thing. If you look at it from a carbon perspective, it's using a lot of timber versus steel or concrete which is way better on that calculus. And it does kind of look nice. A lot of these tech companies are building these ornate timber offices. So that's one trend. Then yeah, there's not an obvious technology that could usurp the sort of standard we have unless it's like a dramatic development in material science or whatever, where somebody finds some way of building something that's way cheaper and gives you way more options than you had before. That’s what steel and then concrete gave you, right? All of a sudden, you could build things in ways that you couldn't do before steel, and you could use so much less structure to build fine concrete, because it was like liquid. All of a sudden, you could make any shape that you want. That's when you get all these really cool interesting shells and really ornate concrete domes, which of course, we also don't build anymore. So I don't see an obvious technology that could replace that. I guess, you know, the other thing is like, when all of a sudden you had technology that could like easily duplicate or make any sort of art possible, did that usher in a new era of way better art or 2D aesthetics? I don't necessarily think that it did, right? So I think if you could all of a sudden build any sort of shape that you want cheaply and easily, it's not obvious to me that we would get really cool things. I'm sure you would see a lot of interesting experiments on the margin or whatever, but it's not obvious to me that the standard way of building in some ways might become even less interesting. Dwarkesh Patel Right. So there is the question of why we haven't seen better aesthetics in these other fields. So given how much you can do with the traditional art today, why do these paintings that are selling for millions of dollars have the common perception and stereotype that they're very simple and ugly? So to apply that to architecture and engineering, there's this idea that Scott Alexander kind of talked about this a lot in his post about a cabal of modernist architects in these guilds who are just very obsessed with building these buildings that the public doesn't like to look at. Do you think it’s true that the architects just have a completely different sense of aesthetics than the average public?…

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