alt Hacker NewsWhy would you need webapps when you could just talk out loud to your computer ?
Why would I need programs with colors, buttons, actual UI ?
I am trying to imagine a future where file navigators don't even exist : "I want to see the photos I took while I was in vacations last year. Yes, can you remove that cloud ? Perfect, now send it to XXXX's computer and say something nice."
"Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."
"Can you produce a detroit style techno beat I feel like I want to dance."
"I feel life is pointless without a work, can you give me some tasks to achieve that would give me a feeling of fulfillment ?"
"Can you play an arcade style video game for me ?"
"Can you find me a mate for tonight ? Yes, I prefer black haired persons."
Replies
Voice interfaces are not the be all and end all of communication. Even between humans we prefer text a lot of the time.
I think this is well illustrated in a lot of science fiction. Irregular or abstract tasks are fairly efficiently articulated in speech, just like the ones you provided. Simpler, repetitive ones are not. Imagine having to ask your shower to turn itself on? Or your doors to open?
Contextualized to "web-apps," as you have; navigating a list maybe requires an interface. It would be fairly tedious to differentiate between, for example, the 30 pairs of pants your computer has shown you after you asked "help me buy some pants" without using a UI (ok maybe eye-tracking?).
I just this week vibe-coded a personal knowledge management app that reads all my org-mode and logseq files and answers questions, and can update them, with WebSpeech voice input. Now it's my todo manager, grocery list, "what do I need to do today?", "when did I get the leaves done the last few years?" and so on, even on mobile (bye bye Android-Emacs). It's just a basic chatbot with a few tools and access to my files, 100% customized for my personal needs, and it's great.
This will eventually cause such reduction of agency that it will be perceived as fundamental threat to one's sense of freedom. I predict it will cause humanity to split into a group that accepts this, and one that rejects it at its fundamental level. We're already seeing the beginning of this with vinyl sales skyrocketing (back to 90s levels).
This is what all the people put out of work by AI are going to do.
Ive been imagining the same thing. Were kinda there with MCPs. Just needs full OS integration. Or I suppose you can write a bunch of clis and have LLM call them locally
> “Hell of a world we live in, huh?” The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. “But it could be worse, huh?”
> “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.”
-- William Gibson: The Gernsback Continuum
>Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."
Better yet, why exercise -which is so repetitive- if we can create a machine that just does it for you, including the dopamine triggering, why play an arcade video game where we can create a machine that fires the neuron needed to produce the exact same level of a excitement than the best video game.
And why find mates when my robot can morph into any woman in the world, or better yet, the brain implants that trigger the exact same feelings than having sex and love.
Bleak, we are oversimplifying existence itself and it doesn't lead to a nice place.