Every significant technological shift in history has come with a version of the same anxiety: what happens to the people who used to do the thing the machine now does?
It’s not a bad question. But it’s the second question. The first one is: what does this change actually make possible?
I’ve been sitting with AI and creative work for a while now as someone who thinks strategically, writes, and illustrates for a living. And what strikes me most isn’t the capability of the tools (though it’s remarkable). It’s how clearly they reveal what was always true: that the craft itself not the point. The thinking is the point.
Design in the broadest sense, designing communications, designing organisations, designing change was never really about the making. It was about the meaning-making. The capacity to look at a complex system and ask: what does this need to become? Who does it need to speak to? What story would shift something?
AI can generate a lot of outputs. It can’t tell you which output matters.
That distinction between production and purpose is becoming the thing of most value. It’s moving us, I think, from an era of individual expertise to something more collective. The designers who will do the most interesting work in the next decade won’t be the ones who are fastest or most technically fluent. They’ll be the ones who can hold the room, ask the right questions, and synthesise across domains.
Curiosity. Purpose. Hope. Those were always the core competencies.
The tools just make it more obvious.