In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman described two modes of thought. System 1 is quick, intuitive and heavily shaped by past experience. System 2 is slower and more deliberate: stop, examine the problem, consider the evidence, then decide.
We’ve all been in the meeting where an influential stakeholder says something in a confident tone, everyone around the table nods, and within minutes the idea has hardened into fact. Designers are often the ones who hesitate.
The odd thing about product design over the last decade is how stable it became. Not easy. Not boring. Not without progress. But stable.
A lot of product arguments are really arguments about whose reality counts.
Benedict Evans has a useful habit of standing slightly away from the noise. For years, his big strategy decks have acted as a kind of weather map for the technology industry: mobile, media, ecommerce, platforms, regulation, capital flows, and now AI. They are not predictions in the cheap sense. They are attempts to show the shape of the system: where the money is going, what assumptions people are making, which comparisons are lazy, and where the industry may be fooling itself.
I don't think that AI is going to "kill design" in the next few years (as some pundits are claiming). However I do think we reached "peak designer" several years ago, and the volume of designers needed over the next 10 years will be less than the previous 10. (This is as much to do with the rise of design systems leading to the industrialisation of design, and the power shift of decision making, as it is AI)