The Third Interface

This essay is adapted from my AGI × Design talk at the MIT Media Lab For most of the history of computing, the interface followed a simple pattern. A person gave commands, and a machine carried them out. Agency belonged to the user. The machine was an instrument. That pattern shaped the first interface: human-computer interaction. Screens, keyboards, windows, menus, and files belonged to this world. The machine could be complicated, but the relation was plain. A human operated a system. The s...