Indeed a dramatic and magnified prediction about the future - A question that makes one wonder about the time we are moving towards. In just a few years, a wave of diverse technological innovation has taken over the entire population concurrently; be it Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Accessories or Smart Offices, our dependency on AI technology is on a constant rise, thus jeopardizing jobs around the world.
The field of ‘Design’ is no exception when it comes to facing this new age catastrophe. While AI enables designers to do things, create things and grasp things that were never possible before, we cannot ignore the fact that they are losing their skills through loss of the need to use them. Though the efforts of 100% reliability are under considerable process, we still have a long way to let AI control the designer world and replace their reason, creativity and responsiveness. Here is why?
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What makes design and a designer valuable is his/ her ability to decide, ‘To be or not to be?’ backed up with reason and a logical explanation. This ability makes them understand the audience they are catering to and defines and separates each one of them. It is this instinct that AI still lacks and in a creative field such as design, reason, and logic are the best and the only strategies to survive, skills can still be learned. There is this unique element of creativity in all the designers that AI is unlikely to replicate at least in the next decade or so.
With every assignment, a designer evolves, his/ her learning grows and with it expands their experience and intelligence. On the other hand, AI lacks such intellect at the moment and needs a human brain to keep it up to date. Even if, in future, AI develops itself with self-experience, it will be very different from what humans do and probably be bound by technology underpinnings.
AI remains one-dimensional i.e. a reverse engineering tool for data while designers are more complex beings. They understand emotions and sentiments, a phenomenon that still cannot be defined by the world’s most advanced psychologists, they possess spatial and visual intelligence along with verbal and linguistic knowledge. No matter the rapid advancements in deep learning capabilities, whether an AI could ever experience emotions is a controversial subject.
Rather than something to fear, working in harmony with AI is the best way to be in the design industry and indeed a great opportunity to meet targets and achieve results. Giving up the responsibility to an Artificial Intelligence in the cloud is not what we should be moving towards. So, instead of thinking about a question relevant only after years of research and advancement, let us contemplate ‘How AI will help designers to achieve the impossible?’ and ‘How AI will carve new directions for designers instead of competing with them?
