Disappearing Skills

Making products is risky. It's expensive and takes a long time.

Communicating an idea in the highest resolution possible helps to mitigate risk. But making an exact replica of one's intentions takes skill, making craftsmanship a necessary element of design. Historically, the relationship between the designer-craftsman was obvious. The acts of drawing, drafting and model making were impossible without pen, paper, saw, lathe. Each tool commanded a different skill and that skill was expressed physically and visibly.

That changed when the tool became a computer.

Whilst there is still a semblance of a physical relationship with the computer, the tool is as much software as it is the aluminium-clad circuits and the mouse in the hand. And the skill has become less visible, particularly when the data crunching and calculations carried out by the machine would be difficult — perhaps even impossible — for the average designer to perform without the computer.

It's hard to separate the designer's abilities from those of the machine — a characteristic that AI will most certainly amplify.

Durrell Bishop designs and makes electronic and mechanical products.

He says that since he began using AI about a year ago, if he has an idea for a product, he "just asks for it."

To illustrate the process, he described a hypothetical product: "I want a circuit board to be this big. I've got this much space. This thing's going to have some buttons, and it's going to have a dial. It's going to have a little screen, about this big. And I'd quite like it to be battery powered." He finishes by saying "And there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you asking AI 'Can you make it for me?'"

Although he makes it sound like magic, Durrell is drawing on many years of operating at the forefront of design.

Before he asks AI to code software and configure PCB circuitry, he knows what he's going to build. But the line between his skill and the abilities of the machine has blurred.

It chimes with the thinking of cognitive philosopher and neuroscientist, Andy Clark. He believes that we humans have already dovetailed our minds and skills to the shape of our current tools and aids.

But when those tools and aids start dovetailing back — when our technologies actively, automatically, and continually tailor themselves to us, just as we do to them — then the line between tool and user becomes flimsy indeed. Such technologies will be less like tools and more like part of the mental apparatus of the person.

In becoming part of our own mental apparatus, AI will blur the line between tool and craftsman even more, but that line is unlikely to disappear.

Durrell believes that knowing what your product is, what it does and being able to communicate it will become even more important in the age of AI.

"Asking" for a product might sound easy, but setting out clear instructions for AI to follow will need the skill and patience of a craftsman.