AI is already altering how we interact with computers, but the distinction could become even more pronounced in the coming years.
Mustafa Suleyman, one of the co-founders of Deepmind and the current AI Chief at Microsoft, has said that that AI will feel like a new “digital species”. He compared what AI will soon be like to what it’s like to work with current computers. “We’ve created this entire, basically arbitrary, made-up, graphical user interface to accommodate for the fact that computers are too dumb to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth. Right?” he said in an interview. “The browser, the fact that you have to press a button, the fact that you have all these different apps, you’ve got menu drop-downs, you have scrolling, the entire user interface is predicated on the idea that..it doesn’t speak the language that I use,” he added.
“(With AI), that is all going to get washed away, right?” Suleyman said. “Now, your computer or your AI is clearly going to understand everything that you’re bringing to the table. Your emotional state, your intellectual state, what you, what you need to get done that day, your interests, your hobbies, your personal knowledge graph, your family and your dislikes. So it’s not just that it speaks our language, it’s actually that it is able to reason over what we see, what we hear and what we believe and think. So it’s more than just an interface — it is a new plane of connection,” he said.
“That I think is fundamentally different, and it’s gonna feel, you know, as I’ve long said, like a new digital species. I mean, it is going to feel like a member of the family, like another layer of connectivity. Because you’re gonna have a (personal) AI. I’m gonna have a (personal) AI. Those AIs are going to connect with one another in advance, and brief you brief me follow up afterwards,” he added.
“So it’s kind of kind of be like a second brain. I think of it as like outsourcing a lot of the mental processing to a very reliable, highly accurate, completely interactive thought partner and companion that is going to help make me much smarter, more productive and feel more supported. It’s very, very different to just using a computer in the way that we do today,” he added.
Suleyman’s vision of the future might not be very far away. Current AI systems are already able to perfectly understand human speech, and are being built to have longer memories. Also, there’s rapid developments in the field of AI agents, which can allow AIs to operate computer programs by themselves. As such, it’ll soon be possible to communicate with your computer through an AI interface in a language like English, and the AI can then operate it through an agent. This interaction will feel much more natural than clicking on buttons or typing on a keyboard, and to such a degree that these personal AI agents, as Mustafa Suleyman says, could be thought of as a new species which helps humans lead their daily lives. It’s still early days, but by being on the threshold of creating a new species, humans seem to already be toying with the idea of playing god.