Economic Resilience
By 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human workforce.
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. Arguably, with ongoing Brexit uncertainty continuing to impact confidence in the UK economy, there has never been a greater need for businesses to innovate.
The UK construction sector ended 2018 on a relatively weak footing, hitting a three-month low in December amid fading demand for commercial projects and the growing risk of a no-deal Brexit.
A new study from the London School of Economics found that British firms are choosing to invest in EU countries rather than their domestic market due to Brexit. Meanwhile EU businesses have been spending less on foreign direct investment into Britain.
Investors and developers are taking a more cautious approach to new projects, prompting us all to raise our game. The challenge is to see this as an opportunity to be better, not cheaper.
We must champion new working practices that allow us as creative innovators to dedicate more time to the ‘gold dust’ – ‘the pitch winning ideas’ elements of our work, while at the same time driving best value for clients.
A two year study from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could eliminate as much as 30 percent of the world’s human labour. As machines continue to transform the workforce, AI has more significant economic and social implications than ever before.
For designers, automation is an innovation to be embraced rather than feared – it could hold the key to how we future-proof our sector and create a better built environment.
A designer’s ability to generate and analyse multiple options in a manual process is limited by time and resources, and as much as we don’t like to admit it, so is the quality of the design solution. Using automated processes, we can produce every conceivable design option, faster and with quantifiable measures of performance.
Architects and designers have a societal, ethical and moral duty to use the best tools available to design the best solutions possible. Not only do the future of our buildings and cities relies on it, but it’s also the key to future-proofing our role as architects.
