Will AI take over UX?

From research to flow diagrams and business analysis — AI can revolutionise the way we design digital products.

There are already estimates of between 10% and 60% of jobs being taken over by AI. And it’s all happening faster than we expected. Machine Learning and AI industries are growing at a rate, that has sped up the talk about Universal Basic Income (UBI).

After all, if machines take all of our jobs, we will need to live somehow, right? So let’s tax those machines and just hand-out cash to the people.

While there are many social and cultural problems with both approaches, let’s not go that far into the future yet. I don’t really want to consider how many people will go insane from the lack of purpose in their lives — you can’t live on Netflix alone.

Machines will take over menial, boring jobs

This is already happening with self-checkouts, self-driving taxis and so on. Boring, non-creative and repetitive jobs are slowly, but surely being replaced by sensors and AI. They’re also learning and constantly improving, so they can easily surpass their human counterparts. That means less checkout mistakes and less traffic accidents.

Robots will take boring, repetitive jobs.

But the highly-valued jobs are safe, right?

Before we get to our favourite topic (UX), let’s look at a job that’s even more important — doctors.

AI in medicine is growing rapidly. Just this January, BBC published an article which says that AI already outperforms doctors diagnosing breast cancer.

And we’re talking about highly trained, very well compensated specialists here. Of course they’re still needed to “correct” and “teach” the AI, at least for a while.

AI can supplement real doctors, but not replace them (for the most part)

They’re also needed for that “human touch” that patients need so much while in treatment. So I don’t believe doctors…