Ground transportation within the late nineteenth century wasn’t much different in comparison with today: Europe already had a functioning rail network, people rode bicycles und the streets were full of horse-drawn carriages. And anyone who thinks of a creaking, wobbly wood cart here, has a false image in mind: The horse-drawn carriages of the late nineteenth century were high-tech vehicles with all of the comforts conceivable on the time.
So when the car was invented, the horse-drawn carriage industry must not likely have gotten nervous. The primary automobiles were probably ridiculed as uncompetitive: too loud, too poorly sprung, too expensive to purchase. Nevertheless, sooner or later with the commercial mass production of the automobile, even the last horse dealer and carriage maker will need to have realized: Something big was coming and the times were changing.
Across the turn of the twentieth century, the event of the car created a whirlwind of technical innovation and economic structural change. And the carriage industry had three options to react to it:
In fact, it was a natural response to carry on to the horse-drawn carriage: For millennia, it had been a (now highly developed) technique of transportation that offered quite a couple of benefits over the car. The primary motor carriage of 1886 wasn’t even faster than a standard carriage, and it didn’t have a roof either.
Those that were visionary enough as carriage industrialists to acknowledge progress might simply have ceased their previous operations. No eight-in-hand carriage was a match for such a strong opponent. But giving up didn’t robotically mean losing: Carriage firms were in a position to specialize and live on on a smaller scale, salvaging not only their business but additionally their dignity into the brand new era.
Those that recognized the signs of the automotive age had another choice: make one of the best of it. For instance, there have been carriage builders who, with their expertise in vehicle construction and their manufacturing capabilities, became a part of the newly emerging automotive industry. Sure, the horse-drawn carriage business was as dead as a racehorse with a broken ankle. But when the brand new competition is 80% carriage and 20% engine, the probabilities of a working business model in the long run usually are not bad.
Legitimate questions. But when you’ve been designing for the Web for the reason that late Nineties, you would possibly know the reply. The Web was the car for video stores, libraries, retail stores, day by day newspapers and bank branches. And at once, speeding toward us within the fast lane in oncoming traffic, is maybe the fastest, most comfortable, and yet least expensive sports automobile of all time: artificial intelligence. Within the Seventies, it only existed in science fiction movies, but today it is precisely as we imagined it back then. Only higher and accessible to everyone. It doesn’t bring us coffee in bed, nevertheless it does our work as designers and copywriters. Fast, convenient and cheap. And what will we do? We marvel and watch. And have three options:
Also a really natural response this present day: If I try hard enough, I may be higher than the machine. Because any AI is barely as smart as we let it turn out to be. And in spite of everything, humans developed the robot, not the opposite way around. So I carry on as usual, believing that as a human designer I can understand the needs of other humans and translate them into interfaces higher than a couple of lines of code can.
Okay, the talents and speed of AI-based tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney may be intimidating. And within the medium term, many designers shall be replaced by software — giving up would indeed be an option here. Giving up and maybe specializing in a direction not (yet) served by the machines.
Granted, many designers usually are not necessarily often called optimists. But a lot of us will embrace the brand new situation and grow with it. If we see artificial intelligence not as a competitor, but as a tool — no — as a colleague. It makes little sense to enter competition with something that’s a lot faster and knows so far more. But once we work together, unimagined possibilities are open to us.
UX design today is (perceived to be) 99% evaluation of numbers and 1% creativity. And that’s a great thing. From a user perspective, it’s a blessing that we now not construct cluttered animated Flash web sites with micro-typography. That we test designs before we publish them. And that we’re at all times improving our work based on continuous statement. And it’s this numbers-based a part of our work that can profit from artificial intelligence. Soon we may have tools we never dreamed of. Machines will allow us to understand how our design may be used even higher by us and people around us. 99% of our work can thus probably soon be done entirely by software. But we must also recognize that we as humans have a decisive advantage over the machines: Creativity. Creativity is what got us to place an internal combustion engine on a horse-drawn carriage. It got us to send messages over a worldwide data network and migrate books and flicks and bank accounts onto that data network. And creativity has also led us to make machines intelligent.
The auto displaced the carriage and horse industries inside a couple of years. Was that bad for the world? From an ecological perspective, definitely. From an economic perspective, no. The prosperity of entire economies like Germany is essentially based on the production of cars. But it surely is predicated much more on their use: It starts with the proven fact that people and goods may be transported by road to wherever they’re needed. And ends with with the ability to enjoy mobile emergency services like ambulances and the hearth department whenever you need them. In order designers, let’s embrace artificial intelligence. If we use it as essentially the most sophisticated tools we’ve ever had, it presents itself and plenty of opportunities for 99% of our work. The last percent will proceed to not be done by machines for now: Creative latest ideas to make people’s lives higher. Tested and approved by artificial intelligence.
