Dr Nick's AI Acid Test: if your role could be worked from home during the pandemic then your role is a candidate for replacement by AI

It isn't perfect and there are some roles that break it, but as a general rule of thumb I think it works for now. Scary isn't it? Whether this happens within 5 or 10 years is the million dollar question, but it isn't if but when

In order to provide any kind of defense against this very real and impending threat to your job, career and income we all need to start acting now

This means changing our service to something that delivers high quality, needle-moving insight that any artificial intelligence will not be able to do. 

This is the difference between machine and human, and if we don't start to show genuine human value then corporations will gladly accept machine value instead

Let's be frank, on a bad day both research and design can be replaced by AI. Not in a good way, but as I've said repeatedly, no-one cares about good, only cheap/fast/easy moving forwards. Or good enough.

GenAI is smashing it for creativity and visualisation with Midjourney and D-ALLE. It isn't long before it gets UI design down pat, then interaction design etc. Design is most definitely at threat.

Research is a little safer but not much more. PMs firing off surveys and interviews for the AI to recruit, administer and analyse is easy to see. It will be pure garbage, but no-one will notice or care until way way too late and the damage is done (to market share, to brand reputation, to profits)

If we have researchers and designers working in effective partnerships, we start to develop 1 + 1 = 3 stuff, i.e. the sum is greater than the parts. This is how we generate the human value that machines can't

This is another reason why being user centric, why letting UCD become the dominant paradigm once again instead of this absolutely ridiculous design thinking garbage, is an important industry shift needed to defend against AI because of the quality output it generates from multiple roles.....not just what the PM thinks 😎 

Value is the name of the game, and the race now is to see who can generate it faster and better - human or machine. If you don't compete, you lose. If we don't win, we lose. This is why collaboration is essential. It's Humans v Machines and we will lose if we don't start behaving and competing like a team.