Very often I will come up with a big existential question that I have no real ability to answer and then, not only agonize over it, but agonize over a

The “can my parents use this thing right now” test

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2023-03-16 13:30:07

Very often I will come up with a big existential question that I have no real ability to answer and then, not only agonize over it, but agonize over a bunch of other questions that branch off from it. I do this both for things in my life and also for things I write about. It’s like a weird inscrutable puzzle box I’m trying to solve in my head and it’s not super convenient, but I live with it. And the dizzying evolution of generative AI over the last nine months has been sending this little hobby/compulsion of mine into overdrive.

And if the last stage was largely defined by consumer hardware — the “smartphone” and then, subsequently, the smart-everything-else…

In a recent piece for The Information, I tried to untangle this and sketched out what I assume is the answer: A single AI interface that operates an entire ecosystem of generative processes seamlessly across difference devices. I imagine a single AI model that remembers all of your past activity and effectively works as a semantic operating system that lives across your mobile devices, desktop, and wearables. I imagine that using it will effectively do to the smartphone what the smartphone did to Gen Z’s knowledge of how a computer works. “What’s a camera roll,” Gen Alpha, or whatever, might ask in 10 years. I’m not saying I like any of this, by the way, I just think it’s the natural next step.

I thought maybe the AI-supercharged Bing and Edge browser might be some version of this. But Bing’s AI, first, went insane and threatened to frame a reporter for murder and then returned as a much more limited version of itself. Though it did help Bing crack 100 million daily active users. Meanwhile, I have never met, in my life, anyone who uses the Edge browser (I’m sure it’s great, don’t email me).