Intention Is the Universal Interface

If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there

The future is going to get weird.

In 2022, OpenAI’s roon published a post titled “Text is the Universal Interface”.

Already, it feels outdated.

We’re entering a world of agentic AI that can understand what we want and handle our tasks for us.

The beauty of this is that it is the beginning of getting computers out of the way.

The thing about computers is, no one actually wants to be on them.

They are just a tool. They happen to be the best tool at the moment for many, many, many things. But still just a tool.

The keyboard, the monitor, and mouse have been the main interface for decades. Many AI companies have centered their designs around this re-orientation of text being the universal interface in the past 2 years.

But we should prepare for another shift. This is the singularity after all, and it’s natural for big changes to start occurring in rapid succession.

The whole purpose of text interfaces is to roughly capture intention.

But if you can clearly communicate your intention in other ways, the interfaces become less necessary. Especially as AI models improve and become more capable of perfectly interpreting and understanding your intention.

So what’s the next phase?

Mind-reading communication technologies.

We are on a pathway to becoming telepathic with computers. In a sense, we already are, but these technologies will remove another barrier that slows down communicating our intentions: the keyboard

Mind-reading technology grants us a lot of agency over machines — In exchange for having a more intimate link with the computational substrate, we are granted the opportunity to put it far into the background.

We can simply manifest an intention, and with that, direct AI agents to do our bidding. We won’t have to manually enter every intention and mess with clunky user interfaces nearly as much. Instead, we may simply take a stroll through the woods and think about what we want done, and intend for our AI agents to do those things.

This is what the future of interaction with computers will look more and more like. At the moment, intention and personal agency are fairly scarce, but it is the currency of the AI revolution.

For this reason, I believe those with clear minds, and focused intentions, will go the furthest during this great transition away from screen interfaces.

In other words: Now is a good time for you to start meditating.