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Comment by anthropodie | Hacker News Reader

A bit tangential but I am wondering now that we have brought everything online, I guess next step would be to integrate AI everywhere.

Consider this, you want to book your table at restaurant so you tell your AI which will inform restaurant's AI to book a table for you. In this whole scenario where is UI? I mean this whole chat with AI thing kinda makes lot of UIs redundant. I don't need UI for reminders, notes, meetings, search results and whole lot of other things. The advancements of AI will eat most of GUI but dashboards will remain I guess. What do you guys think?

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> Consider this, you want to book you table at restaurant so you tell your AI which will inform restaurant’s AI to book a table for you. Now in this whole scenarios where is UI?

Chatting with the AI is the UI.

> The advancements of AI will eat up GUI?

GUI will still be used for creation and interaction with visual data; but AI will replace some uses of GUIs, sure.

> you want to book your table at restaurant so you tell your AI which will inform restaurant's AI to book a table for you. In this whole scenario where is UI?

- "book me a table at Dorsia's tonight around 6"

- "The closest available reservation is at 8:30pm, would you like me to book that?"

- "no that's too late, are any other days open?"

- "The next available 6pm reservation is on Monday next week, would you like me to book that?"

- "no I just mean 8:30 tonight is too late because I have an early thing tomorrow, I'll take any time on another day"

- "Ok, there is a 10pm reservation available tomorrow night, would you like me to book that?"

- "ok I didn't mean literally any time, is the kitchen even still open at 10? can you just show me a calendar with availability and I'll pick a good time"

I can't think of any task that I currently accomplish using an online interface that would be more enjoyably or efficiently accomplished by having a conversation with an AI (or a human). The AI doesn't replace the interface, it replaces the communication protocol, which is obviously a bad idea. Clicking Reserve and sending a TCP request is a lot more predictable, efficient, and repeatable than instructing your AI to chat with their AI.

You made an imaginary scenario designed to make the AI look bad. Of course that’s not a great display of the use case.

How about this?

> Book me a table for me and Michele tonight at Kingsley’s.

> “Okay, I checked in at Kingsley’s but there’s nothing available until 9pm. I see you have an early flight tomorrow and won’t be returning until Friday so may I suggest The Lancaster instead? There’s space at 6:30. Michele has rated The Lancaster a 9/10.”

> Sounds good!

> “Reservation confirmed. I’ve created an event in your calendar and invited her. Also, it looks like there’s a basketball game happening downtown tonight so I suggest leaving by 5:37pm”

——

I think it’s hard to see past the uncanny valley of AI but the reality is that we’re not going to abandon AI when it’s only 85% there. You could say the same thing about speech-to-text a half decade ago (“I can’t imagine fixing the mistakes will be faster than just typing it yourself”), but I dictated this entire post. Technology moves quickly.

Pretty sure this service is already offered by Google or Apple, I remember seeing a demo of it

Google offers it for businesses which don’t have online reservations. A robocaller calls for you during business hours to try and set up an appointment.

The problem is that it isn’t actually integrated into any schedule or reservation system, so they claim availabilities which just don’t exist and you only find out hours later when the business denies the reservation.

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