This is the best response I've read to this posting so far.
The question of whether we could "future proof" visual trends seems intriguing on the face of it, but I feel it breaks down pretty quickly when we start to really think about it.
Personally, I don't see a qualitative difference between what I've heard about AI's development of styles (mainly in game play) and what human designers do. I'll just put that on the table — for most design work, we're producing results that AI will be able to produce, just as well. As with much of what AI seems to offer, the main difference in comparing its work against humans' seems to be in terms of the scale of work-time: AI works much faster, so its body of work grows at a much faster rate than a human-driven one, and trends, progress, etc. emerges much more quickly.
Considering what little I've read about what AI has done in the world of the game Go, it sounds like, given a set of constraints (in this case the rules of the game), that AI can "shoot off" on its own tangent, picking up where humans left off and leaving them in the dust. I read an interesting quote from a human Go player (paraphrasing): "Playing agains the AI was like playing games from the future." Since the rules of the game are a constant, this seems feasible.
However, with something like industrial design (or graphic, fashion, motion, etc.) where the strength of the product hinges in many ways on how well it relates to ideas and situations that occur in cultural contexts, it's not only unlikely that future-proofing would be achievable, it's impossible. Kind of like: Wherever you go, there you are. Design is engaged in a give-and-take with culture, and its product sets the stage for what comes next. So if AI can figure out a new style right now, even if this is based on a deep analysis of past circumstances, that product will itself change the critera for success of future products. What has changed is not the fact of things falling out of fashion, but the rate of development required to keep up, and of course, the rate at which this fashion fallout occurs. So essentially, it could end up being quite the amplifier of obsolesence, rather than its solution.
What I like about this question, though, is that it brings up the fact that it's certain that AI will have an *enormous* influence in developing new styles and approaches, not just in technology and producability, but in ideas and meaning as well. This will occur to the point that it may be rather questionable whether it remains common for humans to engage in such endeavours. If we assume that widely available design AI will achieve the same proficiency as a human, but can do it faster and without any of what we might call the "overhead of life" (things like human rights, entertainment, 2/3 of the work day, 2 weeks a year, the retirement years — all devoted to things other than work, etc.), then what point is there to being a human designer?
Yet several potential routes to a level playing field do come to mind For example, authenticity. What if AI were to become very adept at translating the zeitgeist in formal fashion, to the point that it can produce intriguing designs at the same level of human-powered systems? And let's also say that the AI is simple, in that there it doesn't embody any type of attempt to emulate the human experience of the cultural criteria to which it responds, but instead simply emulates the results (for example, it can read and form associations but it does not express a preference). Is the work as valid? My guess is that for mass culture, the question won't even come up (the answer is, flatly, "yes"). But for experiences where vintage, provenance, history and knowing are important, the work of such a system may not be intriguing at all. At least not to humans (see preference caveat above).
The consequences of this are far-ranging and incomprehensible from our current perspective, and this is only what we can see. When thinking about this topic, I'm often reminded of the "smart phone surprise" that we experienced recently. Look back at sci-fi from before, say, 2004. Any universe that tried to emulate the year 2020 but didn't include smart phones and the particular flavor of the cultural climate that has resulted from them, is completely out the window. It will be the same with AI: There are things that will occur, small adjustments, that will have huge consequences, and will render any speculation from the pre-"x item surprise" obsolete. We can't predict it, but we can say for sure it will be much different than the world we know right now. However, it's not the end of history. Not at all.
