Context Plumbing (Interconnected)

Summary

These past few weeks I’ve been deep in code and doing what I think about as context plumbing. I’ve been building an AI system and that’s what it feels like. Let me unpack. Intent Loosely AI interfaces are about intent and context. Intent is the user’s goal, big or small, explicit or implicit. Uniquely for computers, AI can understand intent and respond in a really human way. This is a new capability! Like the user can type I want to buy a camera or point at a keylight and subvocalise I’ve got a call in 20 minutes or hit a button labeled remove clouds and job done. Companies care about this because computers that are closer to intent tend to win. e.g. the smartphone displaced the desktop. On a phone, you see something and then you touch it directly. With a desktop that intent is mediated through a pointer – you see something on-screen but to interact you tell your arm to move the mouse that moves the pointer. Although it doesn’t seem like much your monkey brain doesn’t like it. So the same applies to user interfaces in general: picking commands from menus or navigating and collating web pages to plan a holiday or remembering how the control panel on your HVAC works. All of that is bureaucracy. Figuring out the sequence for yourself is administrative burden between intent and result. Now as an AI company, you can overcome that burden. And you want to be present at the very millisecond and in the very location where the user’s intent - desire - arises. You don’t want the user to have the burden of even taking a phone out of their pocket, or having to formulate an unconscious intent into words. Being closest to the origin of intent will crowd out their competitor companies. That explains the push for devices like AI-enabled glasses or lanyards or mics or cameras that read your body language. This is why I think the future of interfaces is Do What I Mean: it’s not just a new capability enabled by AI, there’s a whole attentional economics imperative to it. Context What ma...