The Next button
17th January 2023
With the enormous advances in machine learning over the last few years, it feels like we are now not only on the cusp of big things, but that the world is already a genuinely different place than it was just a little while ago. I mean, how does even just assigning homework work in a world of LLMs?
There’s one product I haven’t seen discussed yet that I’m really looking forward to. I call it the Next button. It’s an app one might install on their computer that can access the keyboard and mouse and which puts just a single button in the system tray. When you click it, the model does whatever it thinks is most useful to do next, conditioned on things like the contents of one’s email accounts, calendar, files on my computer and cloud storage, text messages — ideally, any digital content associated with me.
In the Good Old Days, some computers had a button labelled DWIM, which stood for ‘Do What I Mean’. It didn’t work all that well. But the technology has advanced since then.