Architecture

By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort. Instead, I went out looking for more.

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.

Wander around the North-West after time away and what jumps out is the architecture of the cotton and silk towns that initiated the Industrial Revolution. Terracotta that was visually resistant to the polluted air, Ruskinian Gothic straight out of the Stones of Venice, Corinthian columns supporting huge sandstone pediments, and above all many tonnes of red bricks.