Bicycles For Our Minds?
Shaunacy Ferro at Co.Design:
The industrial designer of the future might just be a computer. The traditional design process can be a laborious one, full of iterations and tweaks to make a product just so. For years, design software maker Autodesk has been working on an alternative: a program that sorts through all the ways to make a product of specific measurements and then spits out the best option.
I’ve used computers since I was 4-years-old so saying this article frustrates me makes me sound hypocritical. I’m ok with that. But it does.
Our view of how good or bad things are in life is all about degree. It’s not nice to punch a random person in the face, but punching 40 people in the face randomly is worse. It might be enough to land you two minutes on the local evening news.
Similarly, having computers make our lives easier is great, until they start making our lives too easy and take over too many tasks. It’s too late to try and fight this; it’s only a matter of time before we end up like the fat, idle humans in Wall-E.
I made a poster series a few years ago inspired by the Steve Jobs quote, “The computer is like a bicycle for our minds.”
At some point the computers aren’t going to need our minds. They’ll be able to ride their own bikes.
[Also on Daily Exhaust: We Ain’t See Nothing Yet, Manpower Demand, We Are Redundant, I don’t see designers on there… yet.]