"I think it is safe to assume that no one has ever dreamt of a career in telemarketing or would miss it if it were to disappear. Luckily for us, it is the job most likely to disappear, according to Carl Benedikt Frey’s and Michael A. Osborne’s excellent study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization."

"More importantly, the study identifies three factors that impact the level of risk, allowing us to start thinking about how automation will impact our own specific fields. These three criteria are: perception and manipulation, creative intelligence, and social intelligence."

"In a nutshell, the occupations that are most likely to resist automation:"

"Involve complex perception and manipulation activities"

"Require the ability to come up with clever ideas, or new ways of solving problems"

"Involve negotiation, persuasion, empathy, and caring, and"

"Demand the individual be highly adaptable to different contexts and situations"

"Yet, in the last few years, computer vision and deep learning systems have been deconstructing massive data sets of 2D images and 3D objects, working to inform an algorithmic designer as to ways to manipulate compositions, form, texture, etc."

"The combination of deep learning systems with simple codified heuristics, rules, best practices, and principles means that many of the perceptual activities that a human designer thinks of as their idiosyncratic “eye and craft,” will be replaceable by AI systems sooner or later."

"The second area that is hard for AI technologies is creative intelligence. This is the ability to come up with valuable ideas and figure out ways to solve different kinds of problems."

"In design, a valuable or clever idea may also be the result of a particular insight or perspective on behalf of the team. That breakthrough may result from rigorous research and understanding, or simply from social perspective, philosophical bias, or what is commonly identified as individual “genius” or “talent.”"

"Computers armed with a reasonable understanding of goals can simply create massive numbers of design variations, remixing content, techniques, principles, and patterns infinitely."

"While machine intelligences will be an increasingly powerful tool, it seems hard to imagine computers spontaneously challenging themselves with creative questions, generating creative solutions, and evaluating the value of those solutions to find something optimal."

"Yet, despite the progress that is being made, jobs that require high social intelligence, such as public relations, acting, or comedy writing, seem unlikely to be replaced by automation in the near future."

"Similarly, social intelligence is at the core of human-centered design. Most designers would agree that great designers possess high social intelligence, and a great understanding of culture and humanity."

"There is a clear path-finding problem to solve (how to get there using detailed maps of roads); there are unambiguous rules of the road; and there are easily measurable environmental obstacles to recognize, understand, and react to."

"Only this last category —the perception and reaction to environmental obstacles—involves complex perception activities. At a complex intersection with multiple lanes, pedestrians, bike lanes, random debris, traffic signals, and things obscured by other vehicles,  the perception challenge is quite formidable."

"To make matters more technically complex, the system must not just be “locating” the positions of these things, but “predicting” the movement of these objects relative to the physics of the vehicle."

"Of the four criteria, social intelligence and creative intelligence stand out as the most difficult areas for computer science researchers to make near-term progress that would be good enough to displace a significant number of jobs in the five- to 15-year time frame."

"For anyone doubting that AI is here, the New York Times recently reported that Carnegie Mellon University plans to create a research center that focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence."

"Everyone will be a designer"

"The first impact of AI will be that more and more non-designers develop their creativity and social intelligence skills to bolster their employability."

"To stay competitive, more designers will need additional knowledge and expertise to contribute in multidisciplinary contexts, perhaps leading to increasingly exotic specializations."

"Designers as curators, not creators"

"In architecture, the parametric movement dubbed Parametricism 2.0 demonstrates the potential of technologically enhanced creativity."

"Its implications are already being explored in the gaming industry, as we design virtual environments and large virtual cities."

"Just take a look at the game No Man’s Sky—it relies on a procedurally generated deterministic open universe, which includes over 18 quintillion (1.81019) planets. While No Man’s Sky was unsuccessful as a game, it shows the direction that eventually will come to dominate virtual content development—the designer’s role will be to set the goals, parameters, and constraints, and then review and fine-tune the AI-generated designs."

"In the future, designers will train their AI tools to solve design problems by creating models based on their preferences."

"I can imagine a time when we will have enough data to enter behavior goals and ask the AI system to design a solution framework that overcomes anticipated issues like confirmation bias and the empathy gap."

"But while the barriers to learning and mastering the craft will be lower, the design industry’s superstars will most likely remain unaffected. We saw a similar trend in print and graphic design in the 90s. The arrival of desktop publishing software ultimately eliminated the lower end of the market. But it also created broader appreciation for design from everyone, increasing the demand and the differentiation for the very best designers."

"Hopefully, we can avoid this dystopian scenario, but as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality explodes, it will become the next frontier of opportunity for design."

"Challenges like how we interact with each other in virtual reality and how we create and communicate shared experiences are not only unique for this new medium, but require skills such as creative and social intelligence that are hard to outsource to AI."

"While this is just one example, there is something undeniably appealing about finding ways to amplify our creativity as individuals and across professions."

"I can see the potential for a future where our personal AI assistants, armed with a deep understanding of our influences, heroes, and inspirations, constantly critique our work, suggesting ideas and areas of improvement."

"A world where problem-solving bots help us see a problem from a variety of perspectives, through different frameworks."

"Far from threatening the design occupation, AI offers a huge opportunity for design, especially for those involved in designing the interactions we have with the emerging AI systems."