The Thinking Machine: Paola Sturla calls on designers to renew their commitment to humanism - Harvard Graduate School of Design

Smart cities, search engines, autonomous vehicles: The pairing of massive data sets and self-learning algorithms is transforming the world around us in ways that are not always easy to grasp. The strange ways computers "think" are hidden within opaque proprietary code. It has been called the "end of theory." There is a danger, says Paola Sturla, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, that human agency will be nudged out of the picture. Sturla, who is trained as an architect and landscape architect, has called on designers to renew the tradition of humanism.