There’s been a lot of activity lately around where a designer’s place is in AI and machine learning and this post from Amandas Linden is a good jumping off point to where things are headed.
I also have been kicking around this idea a lot in my head. There was a slide referenced in a presentation some years ago that I can’t track down, but it basically compared a lot of the Web 2.0 startups to classic Unix commands such as: finger to Twitter/Facebook; Usenet groups to Craigslist, etc.
I have a theory that a number of startups in the next few years will take this approach to machine learning and layer a usability layer onto many of the command line applications that exist today.