> I am proposing that rather than act like an opinionated friend, AI would produce a map of the landscape of human knowledge and opinions for you to navigate, one you can use to get somewhere a bit better.
I think this point can be generalized to a lot of products in tech: The original potential of computers was to be able to provide better maps - meaning, giving people supercharged abilities to store and organize information.
What we got instead are navigation systems: You're not supposed to organize information at all, instead, you're supposed to tell some software system what you want and it will magically bring you there - no need to understand any greater structures.
Google made that quite explicit when they introduced GMail and "disrupted" the way we do email: Before, people where curating their mailboxes with subfolders, etc. Gmail was the promise that this wouldn't be necessary anymore: You can just dump everything onto a big pile and use the search if you need something.
AI seems like an extreme version of that.
Maybe we should go back and produce more maps again.
JohnPrine · 12h ago
not sure what this sort of naval gazing accomplishes. software companies are designing their products around user preferences. you or anyone else are welcome to create the kind of software you think we "should" have, but if it doesn't line up with the revealed preferences of the users then I'm not sure what the point is
iFire · 9h ago
I prefer the personal story of AI GERTY https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/ as the ideal personal assistant that will run interference and put the person over the corporation.
I think this point can be generalized to a lot of products in tech: The original potential of computers was to be able to provide better maps - meaning, giving people supercharged abilities to store and organize information.
What we got instead are navigation systems: You're not supposed to organize information at all, instead, you're supposed to tell some software system what you want and it will magically bring you there - no need to understand any greater structures.
Google made that quite explicit when they introduced GMail and "disrupted" the way we do email: Before, people where curating their mailboxes with subfolders, etc. Gmail was the promise that this wouldn't be necessary anymore: You can just dump everything onto a big pile and use the search if you need something.
AI seems like an extreme version of that.
Maybe we should go back and produce more maps again.