The New Anachronism
Pixels are free, man.
If you’re my age (over 50) and you talk to someone in their teens about what life was like in your teens, you quickly bump into a bunch of things that you took for granted then, but which seem wildly anachronistic and weird to Gen Z/Alpha. The idea that phones were attached to the wall is really weird (at one point I told my kids I was annoyed that one of my friends phone numbers ended in 9188. Why? (Can you guess?) Because it took much longer to dial the high numbers on a rotary dialer). TV was only 3 channels? And you had to watch at a specific time of day? And you couldn’t record or skip ads?
It doesn’t take much imagination to spot things we do now, that we take for granted, that are also going to seem anachronistic and weird soon. I’ll pick on two: apps, and documents.
Applications right now are kind of like TV shows in the 70’s: they are hard to build and distribute (more to build but still, there is distribution and installation as a distinct step), they are “one size fits all” - you can install a different app, but you can’t really tell an app what you want. It is what is, for the most part. But let’s imagine AI gets better, to the point where it can consume and create GUI in realtime. Why have fixed user experiences? Why not have your AI assistant build what you want as you want it? Why not have applications be smart and responsive to user intent? Why install apps at all, just have the AI built it on demand. To keep the TV analogy, this is the transition from broadcast to streaming to micro videos.
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Let’s pick on documents now. Why are we spending billions of dollars in CPU, GPU and cloud infrastructure to imitate typewrites, wood pulp and carbon ink? Why is a document linear? We are starting to be able to talk to documents (“give me a summary”) but it’s still very limited. Why can’t we have full conversations? Visualize them with graphs and images? Interact the way we do at a whiteboard? Easily grab ideas and mix them the way we do with normal conversations? Again, being AI-centric instead of using what came before leads us down some more interesting UX paths.
These ideas have challenges for sure - how do you save or share something? How do you train someone if every app is custom all the time? (How will the TV guide keep up with YouTube? It won’t. That pattern generates other solutions for that problem, like search and feeds).
Though change can be slower than we want it to be, it’s a mistake to think that things will keep going as they are just because they always have so far. Creating video and putting it in front of a person used to be hard, and so we had TV stations and networks. Tech made that easier so now we have streaming and much more content. Creating a pixel (in an image, an application, a business document) and putting it in front of the user used to be hard but tech is making it easier and easier. The same things will happen because of it - we will get more, and more fluid experiences that are more democratized, and the user will be increasingly in control of them. New mechanisms will emerge to replace the management and distribution of these artifacts and new business models will follow (and disrupt the old ones).
What else is an anachronism waiting to happen in the age of AI?
Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners
11 个月On this note, I often wonder if we've come to the end of programming languages - why should humans have to learn a special language to talk to machines when the machines now can take instruction in human language? And, what will it mean for the world when every human has the powers of a programmer? I do very much still think it will take skill and discipline to invent and create products so "software engineer" or at least "technology product creator" will still be a full time job. Just because most humans can read & write natural language doesn't mean we no longer have novelists or tech writers or screenplay authors, so I wouldn't expect ubiquitous ability to program means everyone is gifted at creating products. Hopefully it at least means the learning curve on programming is no longer the barrier keeping people out of the "technology product creation" gig.
Product & Growth at ?? #1 Consumer Product-as-a-Service (Digital)
11 个月Thanks Sam - I can think of many of the current technologies, practices, or concepts might become outdated or seem old-fashioned once AI is integrated with brain-computer interfaces.
Future of AI Business Consultancy Pioneer | Business Growth Through Innovation | Senior Business Leader | Product, Marketing & Sales Strategies | Knowledge Boost | Interim & Contract Management | Artificial Intelligence
11 个月I read your article with a smile Sam! Going one step further, I recall a time when there wasn't even a phone on the wall to dial 9188 … imagine having to queue for an outdoor phone box because there was no home phone at my grandparents in late 1960’s! As you noted, we still rely heavily on text and sentences for much of our communication. It’s an incredibly slow and inefficient medium. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians used papyrus and quill to write on paper. Now in 2024, we have remarkable GenAI machines... yet, we're still producing words on paper. ?? What’s really changed? ?? The machines of the future should be indeed providing insights and knowledge using viusal and audio processing of what we see and hear, not merely generating more text, which is slow to process.
Forensic Pathologist, Medical Examiner, Chief of Pathology, Pres/CEO, Attorney at Dr. Bill Manion
11 个月You make me feel young again with rotary phones, 3 stations on TV and Channel 12 PBS totally boring. I read three newspapers every day; The morning Philadelphia Inquirer, the afternoon Daily News and the late afternoon Evening Bulletin. I rarely read any newspapers today with all the Internet news channels. We could make a phone call to get recorded baseball scores LOL. I would think that with so much knowledge in your hand on your iPhone everyone would be a genius and we would be the most well informed and intelligent human beings in the world. Amazing. Feed your Brain. Make synapses between axons and dendrites of your brain neurons and get smarter. W Manion, MDPhDJDMBA
CTO @ AppStream Studio | Helping companies innovate like a startup
11 个月Interesting mental exercise ?? Maybe next could be online advertising and marketing? Without GUIs and standard apps, where would the ads be placed? How to push them onto users? Since AI would be searching for content and products for us, maybe ads should target not people, but AI? Or, perhaps in contact with a rational advisor in the form of AI, all that online marketing based on emotions, clickbaits, and the like would lose its sense?