Weren’t voice assistants a new UI paradigm? Also, tellingly, they turned out to not be anywhere near as useful as people hoped. Sometimes new isn’t a good thing.
AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
91–100 of 219 posts
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been at a SQL command prompt a decade or several before LLM.
That is not the point here. Did you any point believe that you were experiencing a mass market user experience at those times?
I was experiencing something declarative at that point.
What's your actual position? Is "declarative" the relevant piece, or is it "mass market user experience"?
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#93This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…
When you say train dispatching and control panels, I think you've illustrated how confused this whole discussion is. There should be a separate term called "operator interface" that is separate from "user interface" because UIs have never had any locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control. Requesting that an LLM do something is like pressing the button to close the doors of an…
UIs have never the locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control.
Not really any more. The control systems for almost everything complicated now look like ordinary desktop or phone user interfaces. Train dispatching centers, police dispatching centers, and power dispatching centers all look rather similar today.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#94> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want. Maybe we can borrow programming paradigm terms here and describe this as Imperative UX versus Declarative UX. Makes me want to dive into SQL or XSLT and try to find more parallels.
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Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#95I don't really get this. The paradigm has always been there, it has been the technology limitations that have defined the UI so far. Having robots and computers that humans talk to has been a fixture of sci-fi movies. Perhaps the most notable example being 2001: A Space Odyssey which came out 55 years ago.
Sure, but it's sort of how actual usable and economical flying cars would be a paradigm change for transport. The idea exists, but it's made up fairy magic with capabilities and limitations based on plot requirements. Once it's actually made real it hardly ever ends up being used the way it was imagined.
Like for example in 2001, the video call tech. They figured it would be used like a payphone with a cathode ray tube lol. Just as in reality nobody in the right mind would hand over complete control of a trillion dollar spaceship to a probabilistic LLM. The end applications will be completely different and cannot be imagined by those limited by the perspective of their time.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#96This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…
> Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Are humans limited to low-risk applications like that? Because humans, even some of the most humble, will still assert things they THINK are true, b…
In the train example, the UI is in place to prevent a person from making a dangerous route. I think the idea here is that an LLM cannot take the place of such a UI as they are inherently unreliable.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up playing Infocomm games and ChatGPT is nothing like an Infocomm game. They only thing they share is that the UI is based on text. Infocomm games were mostly about trying to figure out what command the programmer wanted you to do next. Infocomm games were closer to Dragon's Lair than ChatGPT, although ChatGPT "looks" more similar.
Both Infocomm adventures and ChatGPT have a text based interface in which you interact with the software as though you were interacting with a person. You tell the software the outcome you want using natural language and it responds to you in the first person. That is a common UI paradigm. example: "get the cat then drop the dog then open the door, go west and climb the ladder" - that is a natural language interface,…
Is natural language simply mean using words? Is SQL natural language? I think what makes it a natural language is that it follows natural language rules, which Infocomm games surely did not.
Furthermore, Infocomm games used basically 100% precanned responses. It would do the rudimentary things like check if a window was open so if you looked at a wall it might say the window on that wall was open or closed, but that's it. I don't understand how that can make it a natural language interface.
> This is a puzzling comment. The UI for Zork has nothing at all to do with Dragon's Lair.
In both games there's a set path you follow. You follow those commands you win, if not, you lose. There's no semantically equivalent way to complete the game.
I remember spending most of my time with Infocomm games doing things like "look around the field" and it telling me "I don't know the word field" -- and I'm screaming because it just told me I'm in an open field! The door is blocked... blocked with what?! You can't answer me that?!
There were a set of commands and objects it wanted you to interact with. That's it. That's not natural language, any more than SQL is. It's a structured language with commands that look like English verbs.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#98This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…
> Both of those are systems which had to work right. Large language models are not even close to being safe to use in such applications. Until LLMs report "don't know" instead of hallucinating, they're limited to very low risk applications such as advertising and search. Are humans limited to low-risk applications like that? Because humans, even some of the most humble, will still assert things they THINK are true, b…
I wholeheartedly agree with the main thrust of your comment. Care to expand on your (related: potential catastrophe) opinion?
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say train dispatching and control panels, I think you've illustrated how confused this whole discussion is. There should be a separate term called "operator interface" that is separate from "user interface" because UIs have never had any locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control. Requesting that an LLM do something is like pressing the button to close the doors of an…
UIs have never the locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control. Not really any more. The control systems for almost everything complicated now look like ordinary desktop or phone user interfaces. Train dispatching centers, police dispatching centers, and power dispatching centers all look rather similar today.
That's because they're computer users.
Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?
#100I agree that chat UI is not the answer. It’s a great start and a very familiar UI but I feel this will default to more traditional UI that shows pre defined actions and buttons depending on the workflow.