How Architecture Builds Intelligence: Lessons From AI

Abstract

The architecture in the title refers to physical buildings, spaces, and walls. Dominant architectural culture prefers a minimalist environment that contradicts the information setting needed for the infant brain to develop. Much of world architecture after World War II is therefore unsuitable for raising children. Data collected by technological tools, including those that use AI for processing signals, indicate a basic misfit. Results from the way AI software works, together with mobile robotics and neuroscience back up this conclusion. Human intelligence arose as a response to information from the natural environment consisting of bushes, rocks, trees, and animals including other humans. Geometrical features in the ancestral setting shaped neural circuits that determine cognition. Human neurophysiology has worked well in abstract thinking to develop mathematics, science, and technology. However, the contemporary built environment consisting of raw concrete, plate glass, and exposed steel sharply contrasts with natural geometries. It appears that traditional and vernacular architectures are appropriate for life, while new buildings and urban spaces will adapt to human biology and be better for raising children only if they follow living geometry.