The Malleability of Tools: AI Is Eating UI
As tools become more malleable, we need less of them. AI is redefining the way humans interact with computers—a user interface revolution as much as an information revolution.
The concept of malleable tools predates software. Perhaps the original malleable tool was the rock: you could hunt with it, heat it up to emit heat over time, carve it into an arrow head, or use it to hold down fabric in the wind. Later, we had tools like calculators. But that calculator still needed to be used with a paper which still needed a pencil which still required a pencil sharpener. Over time, we stopped needing those pencils and pencil sharpeners.
As tools become more malleable, we need less of them.
AI is redefining the way that humans interact with computers. It is a user interface revolution as much if not more than an information revolution.
We can now tell the computer what we want and get an end result instead of having to tell the computer step by step what action to take to achieve that result.
Before LLMs, there was the idea of malleable software—think of flexible general purpose tools like spreadsheets and Notion—which are able to achieve general purpose "information organization" and computation without the burden of single-purpose UIs.
LLMs take this idea of malleable software 100x further. Now, instead of being constricted by rows, columns, cells, and sheets, an LLM can write the code to compute something and return it in text formatted any way you like—including but not limited to returning the end result in a spreadsheet.
For a lot of software, the "hard part" is building the complicated user interface and all of the backend to support it.
At the same time, the "hard part" of adopting new software for most users is trying out and learning a new interface. It takes time and effort. Most users are not early adopters and will only put the effort into trying a new tool if their friends already recommend it or if it solves such a painful problem that it's worth the hassle.
AI will change all of this. Most visual UIs don't really need to exist. The cases where visual UIs are helpful will still exist, but can either be embedded inside of voice or chat or can be minimized and augmented with it.
If you think of a spectrum of malleable vs rigid tools, and on the extreme end of malleable is the singularity where bits and bytes merge with physical reality, creating a world of perfect efficiency, and extreme rigidity is the world pre-software, where every physical item served a very specific and unique purpose and required a human to relay information between tools, LLMs just brought us a huge step closer to the malleable part of the spectrum.