The way we interact with computers has changed over time. In the old days when computers still needed whole buildings or at least rooms, good old punchcards held the instructions of what a computer is supposed to do. There was no mouse, no keyboard, not even a screen that assisted during the interaction between user and machine. Over time computers got significantly smaller and insanely more powerful. At least a monochrome screen and a keyboard became the standard equipment for all those old computer nerds out there. Now computers not bigger than two shoe boxes could be programmed by very special computer languages. These are languages that were specifically designed to support the interactions between the user and the computer. Computer languages like Basic, Pascal, Fortran, C and so on and so forth were invented to bridge the gap between the human intellect and the digital brains.

Computer languages were and still are difficult to learn. Every typographic glitch, every little mistake, every open loop created errors and halted the whole system. Here every character counts. There was no room for mistakes. This paradigm of computer languages that are typed by hand with a keyboard and a screen are still relevant today, but its influence is certainly going down.

What happened next? Apple happened, the mouse happened, the graphical user interface or GUI happened. All of a sudden people like you and me weren't supposed to type weird and often astronomically complicated keyboard strings into a text file. They simply could point on a visual button literally with their fingers to make the computer do certain operations. There was no peculiar language to learn anymore. All you had to know to operate a computer successfully were things mankind already knew for ages. We grow up using our hands and eyes as tools, as early as being a toddler we learn how to melt those different physiological senses together to successfully interact with the world around us. So the move from interacting with the world versus interacting with a computer didn't feel so alien anymore. It much more felt like a natural transition. After Apple's introduction this visual interface paradigm was ported to other computer companies as well, Microsoft developed Windows, Linux came up with alternatives like KDE and Gnome. All of these paradigms are still state of the art today, so they exist since the early 1970s until now, that's more than 50 years. Not bad.

On a second move Apple not only introduced the mouse, it also brought touchscreen interfaces to our phones. Goodbye keyboard, hello iPhone, hello iOS, hello Android and hello to all the others who tried to follow but didn't succeed along the way. Touchscreen interfaces melt the keyboard into our screens, they made GUI even more natural und intuitive, even more captivating. Touchscreens felt so obvious that we even replaced the physical buttons in our cars with that new technology, only to find out that haptics and muscle memory in a car still play a crucial role. The iPhone was presented 2007, so that's about 20 years. Not bad either.

For the last couple of years another very recent shift has happened, another interface paradigm is on the rise. You might have guessed it but I'm talking about the all so prominent AI revolution that is in full swing everywhere. With the advent of AI we don't need to learn a complicated language anymore to talk to our computers. We are able to speak in our natural language and the machine can understand us, can operate, can do things for us. And there's not only one human languages, there are hundreds of them. And regardless of which of these human languages you choose, you'll get a reply from your AI that perfectly makes sense. That's amazing! That's life changing. But that's disrupting again. What happens to all of our so well crafted and meticulously designed graphical user interfaces, our shiny button, all that eye candy, all those drop shadows and liquid glass effects? Will they survive? Will they still be relevant in 20 years? Will we still use a mouse and a keyboard in the near future? Do we still need a screen? Or do we simply talk, like we talk to another human being next to us? So is maybe a microphone and a loudspeaker totally enough to communicate with a machine in the not so far future? And is this a desirable step? Who knows, but I'm certain we'll find out.

One thing that bothers me even now as AI is still in its infancy, where everything is still possible and no one knows in what direction we're heading. Talking to a computer becomes more and more like talking to a human being. That's good, right? But is it? Talking means communicating, so interacting with a machine becomes a form of communication. Literally. But do we really want to interact with a computer, do we want them to become equal partners instead of dumb tools. Is a computer supposed to be a partner or is it better to see them as a tool, like a hammer or an axe. You can always grab a hammer without saying anything or justifying nothing whatsoever and just hit that nail. You can grab a needle and knit a pullover without any form of communication. It's just you and your tool. And your finished output, your pullover. It's easy, natural, understandable, accessible, graspable for everyone.

With AI, with the use of language and communication, certain skills, different skills are necessary all of a sudden. We need to know how to talk. And I'm not talking about the right words or the correct grammar here. The syntax seems to be a solved problem at this point. I'm talking about how we communicate, how to make an argument, how to discuss, how to describe a problem, how to solve a problem in conjunction with another intelligent being. It's a entirely different form of learning, studying and problem solving. It's much more a discourse, a back and forth between different ideas and different inputs. It's a partnership, not an act of solitude and introspection, not a singular creation.

Thinking about how the world functions these days this is probably a logical next step. We are living in an extrovert society, most people are outgoing and work well under public conditions. They like and choose living and working conditions that are communal, they enjoy being part of a society. They even need such connections to work well, to strive or just to survive. But there are others, too. Those quiet souls that always prefer solitude over a crowded environment. We call them introverts and even the word sounds like a stigma. And as one of them I carefully question the idea of simply having to discuss everything with my digital tool, my most of the time reliable computer, my writing machine, my photo editing machine, my photo taking machine. I don't want to talk, I don't want to encapsulate everything in words, I don't want to communicate. It's so loud. So stressful. So complicated. I want to press a button, and boom, let the magic happen. That's it, and that's what I'm going to miss.

It's apparent, a shift of interface paradigms is going on right now. Rapidly and without much time to look back. But… I love my mouse, my keyboard, my shiny buttons, even my liquid glass effects. Computers are tools, but they are also toys. And I'm not sure yet if I want to have them replaced by a tiny microphone or camera on my collar and a bubble fish in my ear.