AI will likely not only change what sort of things you can do with a computer, but it’ll also change how you’ll do them.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that AI will change how user interfaces are designed. He says that given how AI can understand natural languages like English, users will simply be able to ask their computers what they want. If they need user interfaces for a particular task, the AI will be able to create the user interface on the fly that’s optimized for what they’re trying to do.
“ There’s this whole industry of people who work on regulated user interfaces or one another,” Schmidt said in an interview. “I think user interfaces are largely gonna go away. Because if you think about it, the agents speak English typically, or other languages. You can talk to them. You can say what you want,” he added.
Schmidt also brought up the idea of having the user interface be generated on the fly. “The UI can be generated. So I can say generate me a set of buttons that allows me to solve this problem and it’s generated for you. Why do I have to be stuck in what is called the WIMP interface? Windows, icons, menus, and pull down. That was invented in Xerox Park 50 years ago. Why am I still stuck in that paradigm? I just want it to work,” he added.
Elon Musk seemed to agree with Schmidt’s take, replying “probably true” on X.
Schmidt has raised a good point. Most modern user interfaces were designed at at time when computer didn’t understand languages, and had to be given instructions through entering commands and clicking buttons. But computers can now understand languages perfectly well thanks to AI. As such, humans can just say what they want, and the computers can do it for them.
Even for specialized software that might need user interfaces, the nature of these interfaces could change. Photoshop, for instance, has hundreds of options that are displayed to the user right on the main screen. If the software can simply understand what the user is doing, and show a curated list of items that are useful for the current task, it could end up helping productivity by a big amount. This could be similarly be extended to all manner of software. And while it seems clear now that AI will enable will enable new software to be written for a variety of use-cases, it might also cause the rewriting of the user-interfaces of many existing ones.