Automation and emotion

The tech world is abuzz these days about the inevitable coming of widespread automation, which will supposedly wipe out most human jobs out there today. This is half-baked, misleading, and is being exaggerated for clickbait.

It’s true that machines can easily replace monotonous and straightforward human jobs, but it gets messy when it tries to tackle anything more complex than that.

Take any creative field for example. The Grid promises to create websites intelligently through AI, but the end product is going to be a lot of the same — large stock hero images overlaid with some liberally kerned text in an ultra-light font variant. But there’s no human element of any of it. It’s a copy and paste of a fad that’s caught on for no apparent reason. Louder Than Ten has a great article about this.

A software promising websites that make themselves doesn’t mean that web designers and developers are going to be jobless. They’ll just have to adapt. Break the design trend and do something that the AI can’t do — design for humans. AI has no idea what the link between form and content is. It just sees images as metadata and pixel values, and sees text as a sequence of strings. By intelligently leveraging the human element being portrayed in the sites, designers and developers can create products that will easily outmatch anything the AI attempts to build.

This is true for any industry. Any product that will end up being seen, touched, felt, and purchased by a human being is subject to being analyzed, criticized, critiqued, and judged by that same human being. In a product designed by a machine, there’s no playfulness, no thoughtfully placed triggers, and no incentive for the machine to care about its user.

Computers are great at crunching enormous amounts of data and seeking patterns in them, but it’s humans that make sense of these patterns and humans that make the patterns mean anything in the first place. Furthermore, machines can’t actually picture themselves using the product, which could make for some hilariously glaring errors in user-centered design.

And as much as we don’t like to believe it, humans are quite irrational when it comes to decision-making. Most product purchases are based on immediate emotional impact rather than lasting practical value. In two competing products, the one that makes the user “feel” better about themselves wins out over the other. The entire field of behavioral economics is dedicated to studying cognitive biases and dissonances that cause this sort of behavior.

At the end of the day, machines are extremely fast and cost-effective at creating a version of a product. Humans are more thoughtful and deliberate at creating an incredibly emotional iteration of that version, which will eventually outclass the machine.

So unless we all suddenly want a gloomy dystopian society lacking emotions, feelings, and value where everything is more or less the same, I’d say we’re pretty safe for now.