What is Generative AI? It’s going to alter everything about how we use the internet | Hard Reset

We are actually in the midst of a technological sea change, the likes of which we haven't seen for a few decades now. People like to believe technology moves along evenly on a constant, but actually it bolts ahead at times. And right now, one of them is the world of AI that's based on very large training set models. A second is we're about to have a few new devices, robots and wearable mobile computers, which allows us to use computing to amplify in moments where we need to be heads up and present.

Generative AI represents a massive step forward in computer capabilities and robotics. And new interfaces will utterly change both how we interact with machines and how machines will interact with our world.

When these things come together, it creates a whole new computing landscape. You could call it, and we would, the Real Time Internet.

The future of computing won't be about apps or websites. It'll be about you and your imagination. It's an idea called the Real Time Internet and it could change everything. Stick around to learn how this is hard. Reset a series about rebuilding our world from scratch. We've come to Argo Design here in Austin, Texas, to speak with Jared Ficklund. And as a product designer and futurist, his job is to live with one foot in the future. So we asked him to look into his crystal ball and give us a peek at what that future looks like.

Those who've been following the trends with Generative AI know that you can already have it. Write poetry or short story or a screenplay with giving it just a few prompts or can generate images for you. It's actually more than that. It's capable of potentially generating whole pieces of software in real time. The real time Internet is a future where software experiences can be extremely personalized to whatever prompt you have given it.

Generative AI has graduated from making images with creepy hands on them to making software. Soon you won't need someone to write an app for you. You can just tell your device what kind of app you want and it'll write it for you on the fly.

You might say, help me organize my bookshelf. Generative AI will use a large model to assemble a application that helps you do that. The same model can then successfully identify all the books on your shelf. It can then reach out and figure out the values and the ages of them. It can understand what different colors are, and it can even understand a color wheel. When you put that all together with an extreme pattern of like the hundred million apps that already exist, well, it can successfully lead you through a process of saying, okay, do you want to organize them by size, by date, by value, by color? You'll select one. It'll say, okay, move them into this position. Because it's all happening on a wearable mobile computer, your hands are free to rearrange your bookshelf, right? And when you finish, it's important to note that all this started with a prompt. Not only that, but when you finish, the whole app just goes away. It doesn't need to take up space on your desktop as some icon, because you can re invoke it in any time you want. The data that was encountered is now checked into your data marketplace to be useful in the future. So for instance, a couple weeks later, you're like, man, I have too many books. Hey, help me get rid of a couple of books. It checks out. That data sees the two that are most value, figures out an interface for which to list them for sale, and allows you to sell them. This is a different architecture than today.

The way we think of the Internet has changed over time. Now, instead of largely static websites, we expect them to have dynamic content tailored specifically for us.

Now it's getting entirely personal. In fact, almost quantum. Like, meaning that when I go to the Amazon homepage, I see a webpage that was created for me in near real time from certain patterns, and you see a completely different page. They don't exist until we look at them like Schrodinger's cat or something, right? We jokingly call this the quantum Internet. There's a quantumness to it, right?

So right now, the information we see on the Internet is dynamic and personalized. What will it be like when the capabilities of the Internet are also dynamic and personalized? Will this mean the end of apps and websites when any function of the Internet, even one that hasn't been thought of yet, is a simple prompt away?

This real time Internet is where computing is headed, and it's going to be experienced radically different. It's going to be as big of a sea change as 2007 when the iPhone was released and we all converted to handheld mobile computing as opposed to two foot desktop computing.

This is a fundamental change in how we interact with technology. And that can be just as important as the capabilities of the technology itself. Many technologies are limited by the fact that their interfaces aren't great.

An interface is more than just a light or, you know, it's not hard to use. Interfaces also provide the guardrails and they surface what value a technology has for the user. Back when we were in those computers where mainframes and we all use dos. You know, a few key commands could erase your entire hard drive. And Windows as a interface actually put guardrails that made that much harder, which meant that more people could successfully use the computer without doing damage. When you're designing interfaces for technology, you really do need to think about where you are responsible to the user to make sure that this is a positive thing for their lives and humanity as well. 3D printing is currently something that's niche. It's a cottage industry because the interface is very complex. Even just going to a website where they throw up models and picking one to print out is actually really hard to do. But we're about to be in a place where I could tell the printer, print me a coffee cup in the style of Ikea. It will show me four options on a clear OLED screen where I can actually see them on the printing plate. I'll tap one and it'll print it out at that point. That's an interface so easily adoptable that Samsung lg, who knows, will get into the market and you'll have one of these sitting on your kitchen countertop, and you'll be able to have a replicator in your kitchen.

Once again to Star Trek, called it.

TL Gray Hot Earl Grey. This is the stuff of science fiction. And we often think it's the technical capability that holds it back from adoption. And it's not. You can do that whole story today if you're an enthusiast. It's the interface, it's the metaphor and the way we can interact with it that holds it back from wider adoption. And that's a part of the product story for computing that I play with in the interface between the human and the computer. There's a pretty interesting story here about how computing deployed for humanity and product design intersected.

Consider the punch card. This is how humans used to interface with computers and program binary, expressed as holes in cardstock.

At first, computing, in order for you to program it, you had to actually understand the mathematics behind the binary code. Then a layer was placed on top of it that we called syntax that turned it into a language. We being creatures who evolved to understand language, this created a kind of computing that required the knowledge of a specific language. And it was this monastic pursuit of people who could understand that using programming.

Languages that could be written with a keyboard, the tiny, tiny fraction of people who could code in binary was suddenly expanded to a much larger group of people who, who are comfortable with using the command line. Then we expanded the interface again with the mouse and the graphic user Interface.

Then we gave it the metaphor of the 60s office place. This happened with a piece of software we all know called Windows. And with this metaphor of putting files into folders and opening applications into a window pane, everyone who is a business user could understand how to use a computer. And it extended computing from the 10% of the IT department to nearly half of the population that worked in business.

As the interfaces for computers evolved, each change meant more and more people could benefit from the advantages of automation and computing. And each time there was a jump in productivity.

Every time we have deployed a metaphor that removed friction and that the user could understand innately, adoption has exploded. And I believe we're poised at this moment, due to a convergence of technology, to begin seeing a new, or a next, if you will, computing metaphor that would be wearable mobile computing that will operate in terms of having objects that are digital join us and in physical space. This will allow us to bring computing out of an immersive screen out into the physical environment around it. And we're going to have a new vocabulary that's multimodal, such as Launch, that put it there. Close that using gesture, eye contact, voice and certain control surfaces.

Altogether, immersive interfaces like AR will mean that computing can amplify the productivity of even more people. Instead of just people who can work in an office and look at a screen like an architect designing a building, these interfaces will be able to help the people actually constructing the building.

Well, then you get out into the field and you're actually building this skyscraper and you're on the 57th floor and you're putting that girder into place and you're like, how many bolts are there supposed to be? Well, who wants to be standing on a single girder 57 floors above the ground, staring into a screen where they lose all their perceptual vision? Well, if you had a wearable mobile computer, you actually could be looking at the girder with the design overlaid on it. Count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Great, we're good. Let's keep going.

Artificial intelligence and new immersive interfaces are combining to make computing into something that is more human centered than ever before.

I just think we've crossed a Rubicon here. As designers, we used to obsess over the uncanny valley. The uncanny valley was this thought experiment that the closer computing showed you reality or humanity. The more it got small details wrong, it either creeped out the user or helped them recognize that it was not real. And the idea was that this was a valley that was very wide. And the closer you got to it, the valley got very, very deep. This latest batch of AI has closed that gap. Computers are now more powerful than human perception. They can put out more colors than our biology is capable of perceiving. This is why I think there's a reaction to this latest technological sea change that we should pause. We may have to add a new obligation to our levels of responsibility. When we do design, we also may need to ask the question, does this technology amplify humanity, or does it emulate humanity? We should ask these questions as we begin deploying technologies now. It's okay to love technology so long as you love humanity equally or more.

These technologies are here or will be very soon. Things that used to seem fantastical are now commonplace. So it's hard not to get excited or nervous about the possibilities this presents.

As much as it seems like we're like moments away from Skynet, we're. We're really not. We're really in control of our own destiny here. And so long as we believe that humanity can be a positive experience where our purpose could be to create as much love and intellect as possible for the universe, I think we're going to land in a great place.