I know that a floppy disk is more than a 3D model of the save icon. I know because I once installed Simon the Sorcerer from twenty-six of them, one at a time, praying to whatever deity governs disk seventeen that it hadn't corrupted. I remember our family's first PC. I remember the shrieking dial-up handshake, and the particular despair of losing your connection because someone picked up the phone downstairs. I remember NTL rolling out the UK's first cable broadband and the feeling that the future had physically arrived through the wall.

I'm telling you this partly for the nostalgia, but mostly to establish my credentials for the claim in the title. Because every few years since I started working, some new technology has arrived with an obituary for creative careers tucked under its arm. AI is the loudest one yet. It is not the first. And the previous funerals turned out to be, without exception, premature. Just not painless.

Here's what I actually watched happen, and the pattern hiding inside it.

The extinctions I lived through

Digital killed film. I started out in 2008 freelancing as an illustrator and photographer, which meant I had a front-row seat as digital finished consuming film photography. Purists swore the craft was dying. What actually died was the gatekeeping. The cost per shot dropped to zero, everyone became a photographer, and the professionals who thrived were the ones whose value was never really the camera: it was the eye, the direction, the reliability. Sound familiar?

Adobe ate Macromedia. Then the web ate Flash. I watched Adobe absorb Macromedia's studio suite, and later fold Brackets into Dreamweaver. Then Flash, the platform an entire generation of web creatives had built careers on, was executed in public, essentially by a single Steve Jobs letter. People who had spent a decade mastering ActionScript woke up to find their speciality was a legacy format. Some of them raged at the tide. The ones who did well noticed that their actual skills (motion, interaction, storytelling on screens) transferred beautifully to whatever came next.

The tools kept eating each other. I was an early adopter of Adobe XD, and I watched Figma consume it so thoroughly that Adobe eventually tried to just buy Figma outright. Now I'm watching Canva take a run at Figma's territory in turn. Meanwhile Blender went from a scrappy open-source curiosity to an industry-leading 3D tool, upending assumptions about what "professional software" even means. Every one of these shifts made someone's hard-won expertise partially obsolete. Every one of them also handed an advantage to whoever learned the new tool early, while their peers were still writing angry forum posts about the old one.

The phone became a pocket computer. The birth of the smartphone put the world's information (and eventually the world's design surface) in everyone's pocket, and rewired what "digital design" meant. Then interfaces started dissolving altogether: screenless UI, voice, and chatbots going from novelty to norm. The canvas keeps changing shape. It has never once asked our permission.

That's not a history lesson. That's one career. Mine, 2008 to now. If you've been working for more than a decade, you have your own version of this list.

The pattern in every wave

Line the extinctions up and they behave identically:

1. The floor rises. Every wave makes the entry-level version of the work dramatically easier. Digital cameras, then templates, then Canva, now AI. Things that once required a professional become things anyone can do to a "fine" standard.

2. The middle hollows out. The workers who suffer are the ones whose value proposition was the mechanical part: executing a known process to a known standard. That's the layer each wave automates.

3. The top gets more valuable. Judgement, taste, direction, accountability. The human layer becomes scarcer relative to demand, because the flood of "fine" output makes good output easier to spot and harder to fake. After every single wave, the people operating at the judgement layer earned more, not less.

4. Early adopters get a toll booth. In every transition, the people who learned the new thing before their clients asked about it got to frame the conversation, and charge for the framing. The Flash developers who learned HTML5 early, the print designers who learned web early, the XD users who jumped to Figma early. Being six months ahead of your market is a durable business model. It's the entire reason this site exists.

What I did about it, and what it cost

I'll be honest about my own move, because "adapt!" is cheap advice when the person giving it hasn't paid anything for it.

My whole design career was self-taught momentum: illustration and photography, then a first proper graphic design role in 2012, then teaching myself into web design, UI, and eventually full UX. Each jump followed the technology. By the early 2020s I could see two things clearly. The strategic decisions that shaped my work were being made in rooms I wasn't in. And, more uncomfortably, the organisations around me were quietly deciding they didn't need many dedicated designers at all. Where I work now, most business units have none. That's not a prediction about the future of design employment. That's a description of the present.

So in November 2022 (the same month, funnily enough, that ChatGPT launched and started this whole era) I moved up the stack into product management. Not because I stopped believing in design. I remain a stubborn, evangelising advocate for design thinking and UX methodology, and I smuggle both into product work daily. I moved because the pattern I'd watched four times was starting again, and this time I wanted to be early instead of surprised.

Was it comfortable? No. Pivoting means being a beginner again in public, and there are days I miss having "designer" on my badge. But every previous wave taught the same lesson: the people who got hurt weren't the least talented. They were the ones who waited for permission to change.

What this means for you, right now

If you're a designer watching the AI wave build, the history offers genuinely practical guidance:

  • Audit which layer you're on. Is the bulk of your value mechanical execution, or judgement and direction? Be brutal. The mechanical layer is exactly what this wave floods. (I ran this audit on my own week; results in AI didn't take my job, it took my busywork.)
  • Learn the tools before your clients mention them. Six months early makes you the guide. Six months late makes you the cost being questioned.
  • Move toward decisions. That might mean product, strategy, research, creative direction. The specific title matters less than being where problems get framed rather than where outputs get produced.
  • Keep the craft as your foundation, not your fortress. My design years aren't wasted by the pivot; they're the entire reason I'm useful in product. Craft plus judgement travels. Craft alone gets automated.

The dial-up scream, disk seventeen, the death of Flash, the fall of XD: every era's designers were told the end had come, and every era's adaptable designers came out ahead. AI is bigger, faster and stranger than the waves before it. The pattern, so far, is identical.

Consider this your permission slip. You were never going to be handed one.