Yesterday on Coffee Break with Game Changers, Bonnie D. Graham hosted a show focused on designing the future of humanity. You can listen to the rebroadcast here. The session abstract is included below. The show participants included: Bonnie, Masha Krol, Ian Gertler, Maricel Cabahug  and myself.

In her opening monologue, Bonnie said:

The first impact of AI will be that more and more non-designers develop their creativity and social intelligence skills to bolster their employability – in the future, everyone will be a designer

With all the talk of AI and its potential negative impact on humanity, we lose sight of the positive. As an engine for augmentation, artificial intelligence is likely to advance our human potential. The effectiveness of what we do stands to improve – whether its creativity and design, or oriented in analytics. Some would prefer to call it “Augmented Intelligence” versus artificial intelligence. If we view the progression of AI on a spectrum, we could indeed reach the place of augmentation and never approach the other end of the spectrum. This lies at the heart of the artificial intelligence debate.

SHOW ABSTRACT

When humans and computers work together, they can do amazing things that neither could do alone.

Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is an advanced human-like computerized system with the ability to intelligently manage the activities and systems which humans usually do manually. More and more, AI is finding its application across multiple real-time scenarios: handing the explosion of data; the ability to decipher our intent; and ultimately improving the design of the customer experience.

Today, most design jobs are defined by creative and social intelligence. These skill sets require empathy, problem framing, creative problem solving, negotiation, and persuasion.

The first impact of AI will be that more and more non-designers develop their creativity and social intelligence skills to bolster their employability – in the future, everyone will be a designer.  A 2016 Harvard Business Review article on how AI will redefine business management, a critical piece of advice to managers is to act more like designers.

How do we design those AI design tools? How will we design the intelligent services and platforms of our future? How should we design these systems in a way that helps us augment our creativity, our relationships with the world, our humanity?