Open AI, Stable Diffusion and the likes have enabled a range of products to bring AI-assisted copywriting, image creation, and even coding to our fingertips. It was just a matter of time until generative AI made its way over to User Interface design. What if we could generate User Interfaces automatically? To take it even a step further, what if we could predict UIs? It's only recently that these AI-driven interface design tools are becoming commercially available. There's Galileo, Genius, Magician, and probably many more to come. This current wave of'generative AI' might seem pretty new for UI design, but work in this area has been ongoing for years, with notable progress back in 2020.

An important part of the process is to bring in people from across disciplines, even if they have conflicting perspectives. A few years back, experts and pundits alike were predicting the highways of the 2020s would be packed full of autonomous vehicles. One glance and it's clear there are still, for better or worse, mainly human drivers out there on the roads, as driverless vehicles have hit many roadblocks. Their ability to make judgements in unforeseen events is still questionable, as is the ability of human riders to adapt and trust their robot drivers. Autonomous vehicles are just one example of the greater need for human-centered design, the theme of the recent Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence fall conference, in which experts urged more human involvement from the very start of AI development efforts.

The news cycle this week seemed to grab people by the collar and shake them violently. On Wednesday, Palantir went public. The secretive company with ties to the military, spy agencies, and ICE is reliant on government contracts and intent on racking up more sensitive data and contracts in the U.S. and overseas. Following a surveillance-as-a-service blitz last week, Amazon introduced Amazon One, which allows touchless biometric scans of people's palms for Amazon or third-party customers. The company claims palm scans are less invasive than other forms of biometric identifiers like facial recognition.