When I discuss interfaces on this blog, I’m most often referring to software interfaces: intermediating mechanisms from our human intentions to computers and the knowledge within them. But the concept of a human interface extends far before it and beyond it. I’ve been trying to build myself a coherent mental framework for how to think about human interfaces to knowledge and tools in general, even beyond computers.| thesephist.com
For most of the history of music, humans produced sounds out of natural materials — rubbing together strings, hitting things, blowing air through tubes of various lengths. Until two things happened.| thesephist.com
Foundation models gesture at a way of interacting with information that’s at once more natural and powerful than “classic” knowledge tools. But to build the kind of rich, directly interactive information interfaces I imagine, current foundation models and embeddings are far too opaque to humans. Models and their raw outputs resist understanding. Even when we go to great lengths to try to surface what the model is “thinking” through black-box methods like prompting or dimensionality ...| thesephist.com
I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far more than automated tools to our effective intelligence in understanding ourselves, the world, and our place in it.| thesephist.com