What started as a casual catch-up with my friend Mike morphed into something far more illuminating than either of us anticipated. Like most conversations that begin with “How’s life?” we expected the usual pleasantries about family and work. Instead, we found ourselves excavating the philosophical foundations of modern business practice, using AI ethics as our entry point into a much larger conversation about how we’ve systematically degraded the intellectual rigor of entire professions.
The AI Ethics Gateway
Mike, was fresh off a call with a mutual friend discussing the implications of AI, and I have been going through my own personal experimentation as of late, so as one of his “tech friends” he can really go in depth with about it, it was an inevitability that AI was going to be a topic of the night. THE overarching topic of discussion came up—AI as a replacement or tool.
It has become the standard jumping-off point for every AI conversation, but even in the early stages we have both seen the positives and negatives, the uses and abuses—the evils of over-dependence. As we dove deeper we realized the AI ethics conversation was about more than artificial intelligence—it was about the human intelligence we’ve been systematically removing from business processes. We’ve become so obsessed with scale and efficiency that we’ve forgotten the fundamental purpose of the roles we’re trying to optimize away.
The deeper we dug, the more apparent it became that AI isn’t creating new ethical dilemmas so much as exposing the ethical compromises we’ve already made in how we organize work, allocate responsibilities, and define value creation.
The Great Flattening of Professional Identity
The frustration with AI implementation quickly revealed itself as symptomatic of a broader degradation. “We can’t implement ethical AI, because we don’t have anyone left who actually understands the business problems we’re trying to solve. Everyone’s been turned into a process manager.”
This struck at the heart of what we both recognized but had never articulated: the systematic bastardization of professional roles in the name of scalability. The conversation turned to Product Ownership, a discipline that should represent the intellectual nexus between user needs, business strategy, and technical capability. Instead, most Product Owners have been reduced to sophisticated project managers, orchestrating sprints and managing backlogs without the deep analytical foundation that should inform product decisions.
The irony is profound. In our quest to scale efficiently, we’ve removed the very expertise that makes scaling meaningful. Product Owners who should be conducting deep market analysis, understanding competitive dynamics, and synthesizing complex user research have instead become glorified business babysitters, ensuring that developers stay busy without necessarily ensuring they’re building the right things.
The UI/UX Parallel: When Designers Become Decorators
Mike brought up a perfect parallel, that really hit home for me considering my foundations in Human Computer Interaction. “UX designers spend most of their time making wireframes look prettier and writing CSS,” he said, the frustration audible even through the phone. “When do they actually talk to users?”
This observation cuts deep because it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what user experience design actually entails. The best UX professionals operate as behavioral anthropologists, studying the complex psychology of digital interaction. They should be tracking user tendencies across complex journeys, developing sophisticated personas based on empirical research, and understanding the psychological and practical motivations behind user behavior patterns.
Instead, the role has been compressed into something closer to visual problem-solving. The analytical rigor that should inform design decisions—the deep research into user psychology, the systematic tracking of behavioral patterns, the nuanced understanding of how different personas navigate identical interfaces for entirely different reasons—has been largely abandoned in favor of aesthetic optimization and technical implementation. Implementations with no reasoning beyond “That is the market standard”. We lost the “why”, and traded in original thought and experimentation.
The “why” behind user paths, both successful and abandoned, represents the core intellectual challenge of UX work. When we reduce UX professionals to graphic designers who happen to write HTML, we lose access to insights that could fundamentally reshape how we think about digital interaction.
The Scaling Paradox
Our conversation kept returning to a central paradox: the very approaches we use to scale our businesses are undermining our ability to scale intelligently. Mike put it succinctly: “We’ve optimized for efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.” To the point that business models are being developed to profit off the ineffectiveness of our products.
This isn’t just about individual job satisfaction or professional identity. When Product Owners can’t analyze markets and UX designers can’t research users, we lose organizational intelligence. The feedback loops that should inform strategic decision-making get severed. Companies become elaborate execution machines optimized for building things quickly rather than building the right things well.
So, how can we implement AI systems when we’ve systematically removed the human intelligence needed to understand the ethical implications of our own choices? The algorithm isn’t the problem—the problem is that we’ve created organizational structures that discourage the kind of deep thinking necessary to guide algorithmic decision-making responsibly.
The Intelligence Deficit
What Mike and I realized over the course of our extended conversation is that modern business has created what we might call an “intelligence deficit.” Not because people are less capable, but because we’ve structured roles in ways that actively discourage intellectual engagement with complex problems.
Product Owners who should be synthesizing market intelligence instead manage development cycles. UX designers who should be conducting behavioral research instead optimize conversion funnels. The strategic thinking that should inform these roles has been abstracted away, often to consultants or senior leadership who are too removed from day-to-day operations to make nuanced decisions.
This creates a vicious cycle. When front-line professionals aren’t engaged in analytical work, they lose the contextual knowledge that should inform strategic decisions. When strategic decisions are made without operational context, they often require elaborate project management to implement, further removing professionals from analytical work.
Toward Intellectual Restoration
Mike and I didn’t solve these problems over the phone, but we did identify what restoration might look like. It starts with recognizing that efficiency and intelligence aren’t opposing forces—they’re complementary when properly aligned.
True Product Ownership requires deep market analysis, competitive intelligence, and user research synthesis. These aren’t nice-to-have additions to backlog management; they’re the foundational work that makes backlog management meaningful. Similarly, authentic UX design requires behavioral research, persona development, and systematic analysis of user journey data. These aren’t luxuries that slow down visual design work; they’re the insights that make visual design work strategic rather than merely aesthetic.
The path forward isn’t about returning to some idealized past, but about rebuilding intellectual rigor within scalable organizational structures. This means creating space for Product Owners to conduct analysis, for UX designers to research users, and for AI implementation teams to engage seriously with ethical implications. Or in layman’s terms… provide the time, tools and opportunity for your experts to do what they are actually supposed to do.