What did you expect? Did you think they were going to invent a super-intelligent slave employee who can work at the speed of light, without legal rights, retirement, or vacations, and that costs a fraction of what a UX Designer or Product Designer costs, and it wouldn’t replace you?

Listen to this paragraph dictated by an AI 🤖

Let’s be honest, if you were the boss of the company, you would do the same, and it’s foolish to deny what’s coming. It’s better to understand the magnitude of what’s approaching and take measures.

What’s coming is a tsunami, and if we prepare, we can position ourselves on mountains that will protect us from the disaster, rather than staying in the valley and drowning.

It’s like that episode of Electric Dreams: ‘Kill All Others’ where robots replaced hundreds of jobs in a factory, leaving only three workers for random quality control of the machines’ work and a manager to oversee those three humans. The only difference is, with the current level of AI and where it’s headed, it might not even need that much supervision, perhaps no supervision at all…

People knowledgeable about this topic say that right now we are in a haze, like a dense fog where it’s unclear how, when, or in what way jobs will be replaced. However, we already have video banks and filmmaking resources with a complete section of voices, making it unnecessary to hire a voice-over artist. The same will happen with designers of all types: UX, UI, Visual, Graphics, etc.

And yes, also Product Designers. Who better than an AI to predict user behavior when it has access to an amount of information that would take a human more than 100 years to read?

Currently, it already understands images and will certainly be able to read body language in human interviews, intuiting whether the human feels uncomfortable or is hiding something. It will then be able to analyze that data faster and more efficiently than any human.

Who can better and more quickly than an AI analyze the history of thousands of companies and startups to propose the best growth strategy for a SaaS or an app? The best features? What the market needs? What doesn’t yet exist and should exist?

And what about systems that are already running? An AI will be able to analyze the entire code of a system, rewrite all the code to make it work much better, in a fraction of the time, with the best possible quality and without errors, thus also replacing POs, PMs, BAs, Devs, UX, and Product Designers.

The problem, as many people have already said and I agree, is not that they take away our jobs, it’s that they take away our income, they take away our way to pay the bills, save, and live.

For now, what we can do is use them, because those who use them (individuals or companies) will have the competitive advantage until AI gradually replaces us in all areas.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stop thinking about what lies ahead. We might have a wonderful future with a universal income that allows us to live well and continue consuming products wildly as before. However, that income might be very low or nonexistent, and in the long run, it could lead to chaos, hunger, and misery—or it could lead to a technological paradise like the one described by Richard Brautigan in his poem  ‘All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace‘ from 1967:

‘I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together inmutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.‘

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