From Babel to Grand Designs, communication has been the make or break of projects for thousands of years. Will we ever master it, asks Eleanor Young
The Tower of Babel is perhaps the most famous myth of hubris. In the Christian Bible those who built the Tower of Babel speak together, planning to ‘make bricks and bake them thoroughly’ as they build ‘a tower that reaches the heavens’. The brick ziggurats around Mesopotamia built between 2000 and 500 BC, including the Ziggurat of Ur in what is now Iraq, were structures to honour gods as well as for more commonplace gatherings.
The Babylonian builders of the Bible seem worryingly invincible to God: ‘The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them”.’ In an echo of these fears, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Geoffrey Hinton, one of originators of the building blocks of machine learning, expressed similar concerns about the potential power of AI. Speaking to the BBC he said: ‘I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control.’
God’s canny muddling of the Babylonians’ language to disrupt their communication may not be an option for Hinton, but lesser mortals than these often encounter the same problem.
Alongside the Bible and a Nobel Prize-winner, let’s throw in presenter Kevin McCloud who regularly tests this critical ingredient for progress. Setting another Grand Designs house project up for a dramatic 47 minutes, he warned one couple not long ago that the build process would unavoidably take over their lives. And indeed it did for that particular pair. One early hiccup saw the project stall as the groundworks contractors and brickies failed to agree who should build the blockwork layer in between the two.
It is easy to see why one might want to pass on the running of a construction project to a higher form of intelligence
A friendly local builder and some wise words resolved matters there. But reflecting on such an apparently intractable problem it is easy to see why one might want to pass on the running of a construction project to a higher form of intelligence rather than expending AI on door schedules. However, I suspect that machines may never want to take over construction – or would contrive to turn architecture into a standard product, as governments over the years have attempted.
You can also see one very human branch of the Tower of Babel story: why people might have fallen out over a building project – even one substantially smaller than the Tower of Babel – as they realise they not speaking the same language. We all know that it doesn’t need divine intervention to make communication a problem.