Imagine never having to click through a software application again. Ever. The days of finding yourself staring blankly at the first screen of a new tool and wondering “What do I do now?” are disappearing.
AI is quietly changing the way software is built and it’s a massive deal. Instead of software applications that users must learn to navigate, we are witnessing the birth of applications that users can talk to.
Once you notice it, it’s impossible to ignore. Software applications are moving from dashboards and processes to conversational interfaces. In essence, users don’t want tools, they want results, and AI is now making it possible to deliver them.
That is, if you want to generate a report that takes 5 tabs to do, you could simply type “generate a summary of our quarterly results” and that’s it. It’s handy, but it is also somewhat weird. It is as if software went from something that you use to something that works for you. It is as if it is a coworker.
But it is not just this article that is saying that. I looked at a bunch of other articles that discuss what the current state of the industry is, and there is a trend towards automating entire business processes, and letting AI take the reigns.
Companies are optimizing for speed, for efficiency, for scalability, and perhaps for lack of knowledge about what’s going on in their companies. I don’t know.
I am torn. On the one hand, I like that idea. I would rather do less busywork. On the other hand, I feel like we’re going to lose knowledge about what we are doing. It is as if everyone using GPS makes us all terrible at navigating.
In addition, there are far-reaching economic consequences. AI isn’t just changing the way we interact with software, it’s changing the way we work. That’s great, in principle. Except that now the tasks that enabled that productivity may be handled by the AI, too.
Oh, and almost no one is talking about the psychological effects of all of this. We’re not just changing what we use, we’re changing how we behave. Instead of needing to understand something, we only need to understand how to ask about it.
This is a massive shift. Yes, it makes things easier, more accessible… but it also makes us far more dependent on things we don’t understand.
I came across a more general treatment of how AI is affecting society that sort of touches on this tradeoff between efficiency and agency, speed and understanding.Everything is complicated. It always is.
So yes. Software is improving. Getting faster. Simpler.
But the thought that keeps echoing in my brain is this: when we make everything as simple as asking a question… do we stop caring about the answers?
Because once you’ve gotten used to software that will simply listen to you… well. There’s just no going back.
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