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.
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?