How the solution to one of the web’s most despised jobs, is going to make all web work virtually obsolete.
Do you remember the milkmen of the 60’s? If you are too young to remember, were you alive to see and the telephone booths that used be visible on nearly every stretch of your city?
Today, in the united states, milkmen are no longer necessary and telephone booths share the same fate as part of a quaint not-so-distant history of services that are hard to fathom.
What puts an end to these two industries seem common sense to us now, but came out of the left field in those times. Better Refrigeration and Chain supermarkets helped to displace the Milkmen, and the predecessor of the small buzzing rectangle that you keep at arms reach from you ended the phone booth industry.
While learning about programming in my youth, I was taught about the different levels of programming languages and how with each stage it becomes easier to understand and interact with your computer.
With low-level programming, you are communicating with the computer with very little abstraction: speaking in machine language (sometimes binary code).
As time has progressed, we have become better at abstracting and developing tools to help others code with ease and created higher-level programming languages that are easier to understand.
Thanks to changes in technology and improvements in this field, we are nearly there, and many more people are able to learn and benefit from coding.
It has given birth to a generation of developers, and designers who benefit from building off of the languages and software that are commonly now used to translate their desires into commands that our machines can understand.
It is now much easier to create websites and host them compared to the time during the dot-com bubble, and when Netscape and internet explorer began to compete for the market share.
Now nearly two decades later, with many frameworks and the ability to work and collaborate on projects with people together, there is a global economy for commodity web work.
Due to pre-made templates and themes, the need for original design and development work has been cut down drastically. Need a website? Just go to wordpress.org and make yourself one in five minutes.
With everyone and their mother has one or more websites like these, it becomes a priority for new businesses to look unique and professional and not cookie cutter. That need pushes entrepreneurs to employ designers and developers to help them create these custom websites built on the platform of their choosing.
The communication between a designer and developer can also leave things lost in translation and can take up time and resources. So entrepreneurs and large companies now look for hybrid Designer/Developers. This saves money and creates a more fluid product as there are no discrepancies between the designer and the coder.
The process of turning designs into code has always been a rocky one.
In the 90’s We used to call this process “Slicing” because you would take the literal image cut out the elements that needed to be clicked and so forth. When the web changed formats over to html4-html5 + CSS became more commonplace and use of tables on the web was obsolete.
The communication between a designer and developer can also leave things lost in translation and can take up time and resources. So entrepreneurs and large companies now look for hybrid Designer/Developers. This saves money and creates a more fluid product as there are no discrepancies between the designer and the coder.
There have been many efforts to create software to remove the need for developers (like Dreamweaver) and now there are ones to remove the need for designers as well.
But most of these solutions, while improved, are still no better than hiring a capable developer/designer for your brand.
In this current system, you either become a master at one language, or the swiss army knife of web work if you want to stay heads and shoulders above the ever growing amount of new coders and technology.
The Blindsiding Tech From Left Field: Machine Learning (& Computer Vision)
Do you remember that stuff that I told you about languages getting better at translating between us and the machine?
On one side of the equation, this has worked very well, and we have been continuing to make it easier for everyone to work with machines.
On the other side, we have been steadily building ways for machines to make sense of our world on their own. With machine learning, much like the developer/designer hybrid, does not require the translation of concepts.
This sector has been slow from the beginning but is growing at an exponential rate. While it took us 2–3 decades to make the web and easy websites a reality, it will take machine learning a fraction of that time to catch up and exceed our ability to create.
Machine Learning Thrives on Big Data, & we have given it to them.
In the book “Steal like an artist” by Austin Kleon, there is an underlying concept of taking influence for your own work based on the concepts and art that have come beforehand. With machine learning, it’s a similar concept; We can teach machines to learn art concepts by feeding it rich images of art from around the world.
How does a machine learn how to code and learn how to design to our aesthetic?
Sites like Behance & Dribble have enough designer submitted data and categorization to train the AI to categorize styles and ratings of good design.
Sites Like Github and other repositories, as well as programming language documentations and website source code can be used to iteratively train the developing AIs.
Taking a screenshot of the page, and training the machine to match its source and vice versa.
Why this kills the future of web design/web development
Designers: Imagine a program that could take a photo of a UX pencil sketch or a digital wireframe and could “fill in the gaps” and create a website on its own.
It could even provide the user with options to give it a logo and it would design the whole site based around that.
Developers: Imagine if this program could not only take that design but also seamlessly translate it into any platform, better than anything Ionic or Adobe Cordova ever could. (Responsive Code, Mobile Apps — IOS, Android). Now lets take it a step further. What if it could take the design and plugin WordPress, or plug in Shopify, and continue to add modules for new software that comes out?
This will force the software companies to develop API’s and documentation purely for this AI program/Software company to develop autonomous solutions for all new platforms, cutting out the need for developers and designers completely.
The change won’t be immediate, but this is something that isn’t based on how fast humans are at adapting their habits. This change is seamless, something that will be invisible to the average consumer. It will be difficult in the future to tell if a site has been designed and coded by hand, or machine made.
That’s not a bad thing though: just like the telephone booths and the milkmen, website development and website design have served its purpose.
The webcrafters helped to disrupt many industries with technology. Now that same technology has come back to disrupt our own.
Isaiah(http://nwukor.com)