I first discussed this topic in a meetup at dayone together with Sarrah Vesselov. If you want, you can view a recording of the talks. Due to the amount of interest, I decided to write some more about it. In this post, I will discuss whether artificial intelligence (AI) will take over design systems. I will also consider if AI has a place in a human-led design system workflow at all.

Disclaimer: I am not an AI expert. If my research does not check out, please let me know.

What is AI

When people talk about AI, I always picture a robot. Something like C3PO¹ from the Star Wars² movies. C3PO is a humanoid robot that can listen, speak, see, move and interact with the physical world. C3PO can reason about the world and make informed decisions.

Many people probably have a similar picture in their head when they hear AI but it’s wrong.

C3PO is actually an AGI³ (artificial general intelligence). There are many AGIs in movies⁴ but none exists in reality³. Additionally, there are only very few species that have general intelligence. Apart from humans, scientists believe that rodents and primates possess general intelligence⁵.

But if the robots in our minds are a form of AGI, what is AI, and what are the differences? Great question, let's find out.

What defines an artificial general intelligence?

Before I get into this, I want to note that this is not a scientific definition. I’m just trying to explain the difference in an easy-to-understand way.

An AGI is a type of intelligent agent³. An intelligent agent⁶ (IA; synonym of AI) tries to achieve goals by perceiving its environment and taking actions on its own. It may improve itself by learning skills or knowledge.

What sets an AGI apart from an AI is that it must be able to achieve or learn to achieve any intellectual task that humans or animals can achieve. An AGI is not required to be sentient⁷ or conscious⁸.