A conversation about AI and our design jobs with Brian Merchant, author of 'Blood in the Machine"
This is the conversation that we desperately need right now in the design industry. Brian Merchant and Evan Winston will be having a candid conversation about AI's impact on tech and design, ethics around AI, and what we can do collectively as workers to survive in the present environment of mass layoffs and the 'Hard Tech' era.
For those of us who have not yet read Merchant's book: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, please take a moment to listen to a great interview he did with Adam Conover about "the historical Luddites and their fight against wealthy elites replacing the working class with machines."
It's certainly not difficult to see the parallels between worker rights during the industrial revolution of the 1800s and AI's effects on our present careers.
This event has been in the works for months. None of the usual sponsors and venues have wanted to touch this topic, so it's with much gratitude that the folks at Koi Studios (Anyi Sun and Andrea Nguyen) have stepped in to fund this talk and make it a reality.
Schedule
6:00PM - Door open & mingling time, grab some refreshments and dinner from BigNorm
6:45PM - Start of conversation
7:45PM - Audience Q&A
8:30PM - Doors close, some of us will grab and drinks nearby but this will be self-organized and ad-hoc
Catering
Catering will be provided by my favorite Korean restaurant, BigNorm (Yelp, Google)
Bibimbap - tofu or mushroom
Vegetables Dumplings
Yubu - avocados and spicy tuna
Tofu skewers w/ Sweet and spicy sauce
Japchae
Green salad with BigNorm dressing
Who this is for
While Designer Friends is a community for senior designers, this is a conversation that is applicable for other senior members of the tech industry. Senior PMs, engineers, marketers, and other design-adjacent folks with 5+ YoE are welcomed as well.
About Brian Merchant
Brian Merchant is a writer, reporter, and author. He writes the newsletter BLOOD IN THE MACHINE. He is a reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute, and a journalist in residence at the Omidyar Network. Previously, he was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at Motherboard (RIP). He's the author of The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown) and Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech (2023, Little, Brown), and a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform. They published a best-of anthology, Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, with MCD Books, in 2022.
About Evan Winston
Evan Winston is an engineer, designer, and artist, formerly of LinkedIn and Airbnb.
He advocates for greater consumer education, data agency, and corporate accountability in spaces dominated by generative AI exceptionalism. He has experienced, first-hand, top-down mandates obligating the use of generative AI in professional contexts and voiced concerns both internally and externally along the way.
He may have a slight problem with authority.
Sponsor
Koi Studios
Special thanks to Anyi Sun and Andrea Nguyen of Koi Studios for sponsoring this much needed conversation.
Koi Studios is a modern product design studio that offers user-centric strategy and exceptional digital designs to unlock your product’s full potential.