How do we defend our design?

There's no point to in defending them any more. It's not that we didn't try; we had tried so hard till we couldn't find the motivation any more.

When the entire nation is rushing to chop the front row seat in this AI rat race at neck-breaking speed, craftsmanship is being left behind and ditched completely, which begets one question: should we still spend time crafting our ideas when we know clearly that they won't even be picked up by key decision makers in business? A withdrawal seems to be the only way out.

When I started to work a decade ago I would have probably thought, “I will spend my best hours solving abstract problems for a company, and in exchange I get money, status, comfort and eventually freedom, both financially and personally.” but now AI is beginning to undermine the emotional justification for that bargain. If the work becomes increasingly about producing more, faster, while the human judgement and craftsmanship I cared about are repeatedly overridden by business priorities, then the money starts to feel like compensation for something I no longer believe in.

Why am I spending my life becoming better at something that no longer feels meaningful?

AI was supposed to liberate us from mundane work so that humans could spend more time doing meaningful, creative things. Yet many people are experiencing the opposite possibility: the more machines can produce, the less valuable human production feels.

If the machine can generate the interface, write the copy, produce the illustration, prototype the interaction and even propose the strategy, then the I am left asking, “What exactly am I supposed to be proud of?” Ironically, businesses are assuming designers will be replaced by AI one day, but they should be replaced by AI in the first place because their decisions are no longer based on the human judgement that designers bring to the table.

I think we may be entering a period where people start separating work that pays from life that means something much more aggressively.