When adapting to new technology, we always start by recreating the familiar past instead of imagining entirely new ideas. You should see 👇 guy's talk on this topic.
Early TV was basically filmed radio shows.
When mobile apps first exploded, every big company executive asked "What's our mobile strategy". Most companies essentially shrunk their websites into phone screens, checking the "mobile strategy"box without understanding the platform's native potential.
Then products like Uber came that could only exist on mobile.
Skeuomorphic Thinking is the idea that before we make truly native things on a new platform, we go through a phase where we try to make old familiar things first. It's like our collective imagination needs some time to warm up when new technology arrives. First we copy what we know, then slowly discover deep ideas about what makes the new platform unique.
Early cars were designed like horseless carriages. Early electric lights in homes had the same form as gas lamps. Early smartphones had physical keyboards. Even software follows this pattern. The save icon is still a floppy disk. Our documents icon still looks like paper. Our desktop has files and folders - all metaphors from the physical world that we still carry forward.
And now we're in the middle of an AI revolution. And guess what we're doing? The same thing! We're asking AI to write emails like humans, generate images that look like human art, and automate existing workflows. These are all "horseless carriage" versions of AI.
Next gen AI applications will continuously learn as they interact with the world - no human would be able to keep up with the rate of learning. Interfaces might disappear or will be "generated" when you need them. adapt to them. Or collaborative problem-solving where AI doesn't just answer questions but gives entirely novel approaches to problems. I am limited in my imagination currently to fully think about the possibilities.
The most exciting AI applications won't be versions of things we already do - they'll be things we've never imagined before. I am eagerly waiting for true AI-native applications.