This article is like people in the early days of GUIs complaining that graphical interfaces make using a computer so much slower versus just typing the right command in console right away.
That was true at first… until it wasn’t.
AI is still in its infancy and a lot of the noise discussed in the article is real. But it will eventually create an Internet/OS interface we can barely fathom. Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.
> Just project yourself 50 years from now: our current web pages will look archaic. Everything will be conversational, using language, vision, the whole spectrum.
To what end?
We’ve interacted with the internet using the same text-oriented protocols, the same markup languages, and even the same layout elements for 36 years. What profit motive exists to upend that and standardize on a new format like conversational language?
And, based on the development trends of the internet over its entire history, what suggests that if the world were to commit to some radical shift in the foundational technology underpinning the web, it would move towards voice, or vision (what does this mean?) based interfaces.
I get that AI is cool, and it has legitimate use cases, but is it possible that we as technologists might be falling into that age-old trap of having a solution in search of a problem?
And yet some of us never asked for that. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about the data on it, I came to the page to read whatever that data was. I didn't ask to come to a page and have a conversation about filling in spreadsheet headers, I wanted to write out the dang headers and start populating my data. I never asked to downgrade to a lossy interpretation of human natural language, I already know how to get computers to do my bidding quite well, and quite quickly, if they stay out of my way.
