My concern is more attributed to the tasks that can't or won't be outsourced.
People who maintain a high level of curiosity or a have drive to create things will most assuredly benefit from using AI to outsource work that doesn't support those drives. It has the potential to free up more time for creative endeavors or those that require more deep thinking. Few would argue the benefit there.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism is rampant, media literacy is in decline, and a lot of people are content to consume content and not think unless they absolutely have to. Dopamine is a helluva drug.
If LLMs reduce the cognitive effort at work, and the people go home to doom scroll on social media or veg out in front of their streaming media of choice, it seems that we're heading down the path of creating a society of mindless automatons. Idiocracy is cited so often today that I hate to do so myself, but it seems increasingly prescient.
Edit: I also don't think that AI will enable a greater work-life harmony. The pandemic showed that a large number of jobs could effectively be done remotely. However, after the pandemic, there was significant "Return to Office" movement that almost seemed like retribution for believing we could achieve a better balance. Corporations won't pass on the time savings to their employees and enable things like 4-day work weeks. They'll simply expect more productivity from the employees they have.
In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.
Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.
I never worked for Apple, but I've used mostly Macs since System 6, and am feeling the same frustration with their software. Unfortunately their laptops are way better than anything else out there, so I'm forced to tolerate it. I ran Linux on a PowerBook for awhile, but it was janky, and it seems like that has not changed. OS X is still basically Unix, so I'll go on running the Unix stuff I need, and turn off the lickable distractions to the extent I can.
I recently switched to Linux Mint on a makeshift PC and it feels a bit like going back to Snow Leopard. It's snappy, pleasant to look at and has all the necessary modern features I need. Very surprisingly and unlike everything I experienced before on Linux desktops, it all worked out of the box (plus a few extra clicks on a GUI to get some proprietary drivers).
You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.
And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.
When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)
Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.
I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).
I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.
A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.
Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...
> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.
That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.
> M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.”
I had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive.
Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information.
It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.
I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit.
Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.
Would you be willing to share what career/field you moved into that won't be outsourced any time soon?
Personally, after spending the last decade in FAANG, I've grown disillusioned with the tech world but still have kids I need to take care of for the next 10-15 years.
People who maintain a high level of curiosity or a have drive to create things will most assuredly benefit from using AI to outsource work that doesn't support those drives. It has the potential to free up more time for creative endeavors or those that require more deep thinking. Few would argue the benefit there.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism is rampant, media literacy is in decline, and a lot of people are content to consume content and not think unless they absolutely have to. Dopamine is a helluva drug.
If LLMs reduce the cognitive effort at work, and the people go home to doom scroll on social media or veg out in front of their streaming media of choice, it seems that we're heading down the path of creating a society of mindless automatons. Idiocracy is cited so often today that I hate to do so myself, but it seems increasingly prescient.
Edit: I also don't think that AI will enable a greater work-life harmony. The pandemic showed that a large number of jobs could effectively be done remotely. However, after the pandemic, there was significant "Return to Office" movement that almost seemed like retribution for believing we could achieve a better balance. Corporations won't pass on the time savings to their employees and enable things like 4-day work weeks. They'll simply expect more productivity from the employees they have.