I can’t even with this have the children never heard of headless computing? servers? embedded systems? how do they think data centres work? do they think people click into every single virtual machine and check and move things around manually? even your personal device does so much on its own, and it’s only grown over the years (who else remembers having to defragment their hard drive?). I use this analogy *a lot* in my day-to-day work but — agents are just more sophisticated daemons. Background processes that execute a task using other resources on the computer, as specified by a controller. It just happens to be one level of abstraction higher than in the past. The hardware is already being redesigned for neural networks, as it has been since deep learning first emerged, only more so. As with all things, it happens gradually. Apple, who keep touting neural chips in everything and have been for years, even just gave their head of hardware engineering the top job because maintaining momentum here matters, so it’s not like people aren’t thinking about this. There remains a gap in new interfaces, but that shit’s hard to do, harder to monetize, and most people just aren’t that creative about it. It also doesn’t play into the recurring fantasy where every third founder (still!) thinks they’re Steve Jobs incarnate (but not Jobs from when he started, selling homebuild computers — forty years of experience Jobs introducing the iPhone)

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market. like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer. the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions. that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous. you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all. this all leads to some interesting questions: - what is a file when the system understands context? - what is an app when intent can route itself? - what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents? - what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember? - what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all. the old computer assumed navigation. the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency. we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors. the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.