589
AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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That philosophy has never been successfully been applied in the GUI space and especially not in the Linux world. Bash/Shell gets away with it because it has pipes and scripting that allow you to plug different apps together to form something bigger. In the Windows world they tried something like that with OLE and NeXTSTEP did something with DisplayPostscript, but none of it stuck around to become a foundational layer for GUI apps the way pipes are for command line tools. These days all GUIs are back to being monolithic blobs.
Begs the question for gui's then or?
I always wonder what another interaction scheme would look like if it weren't for "click", I've always wondered about tunnels or roads, like we do in real life, to continuously travel toward a destination, rather than discretely click.
Didn't have to be this way. CLI is underrated as any computer dev knows, power is in the knowledge. How about we apply the AI search problem to cli commands, what happens then?
There is the filter graph or node graph, found in things like Unreal Blueprints, Blender or ComfyUI. That's kind of the GUI version of a pipe and even quite a bit more powerful as you can have multiple inputs and outputs. But it's just something individual apps implement, it's not something any OS has as a native primitive.
For something a little more CLI-like, there is Archy, which is kind of like Emacs, where programs are just commands that operate on the same bit of data, not complete separate things, but that never made it past some prototypes and it's hard to see how it could work for the whole OS, where you have to deal with a wide variety of file and data formats. It had a commercial predecessor with Canon Cat in 1987, but that also ended up a dead end.
Another thing is Project Xandau, this is more of an alternative to the WWW than just a GUI/OS, but it would have had some neat properties like links to and quotes from other documents being actual references to those documents, not copy&paste. But again, nothing but prototypes.
Unix shells just assume everything is text, which makes all the small tools possible. But the GUI world contains a lot more than just plain text, which makes it difficult to come up with any universal scheme that can have the same flexibility. Even HTML, which is the closed thing to an universal data format in the modern GUI world, fails quite miserably here as, as it ends up being just a format for content consumption, not a format that is used in the creation and management of the data.
At the current pace we'll have AGI long before we have any real innovation in GUIs. Will probably end up with StarTrek like interface sooner or later where you just say what you want and the AI figures out how to get it, ChatGPT already isn't that far off and can handle a lot of simple grep/sed like tasks quite well, even shell one liner can be produces with a reasonable rate of success. What's is a way to let it access and operate on local data.
Sweet, thanks for the write up. Do you play with anything tool wise on this, I mean I constantly ask chatgpt for bash and python programs / logic, but that HTML idea sounds sorta fun. Where would that lead? Should it be even more standadized?
You have any other such methodologies that you seem to hold onto other than Unix, that are atomic and simple? Any fun blogs etc? I love stuff like this.
That's the billion dollar question. Whoever figures that out and builds it will be the next Microsoft/Google/Apple/...
Microsoft, Adobe and a lot of other companies are starting to patch some AI features into their apps, but the thing that makes ChatGPT so interesting is that it is universal, it can generate code, cooking recipes and write short stories and it can do all of that at once. Having an AI be stuck in a single app feels limited compared to that. But at the same time ChatGPT itself is locked in its own little text-window, which is limiting it as well. ChatGPT-style AI that can operate like a full OS, that would be the holly grail and I am sure plenty of companies are working on something like that.
Not sure about blog, but here are a couple of random vaguely related books and videos on the topic:
I find the older stuff especially interesting as it has a more clean-slate approach to interface design and isn't stuck in modern conventions.
So glad I asked. Thanks a lot, right up my alley!