In the future, language models will be our interface to the world

post by Daniel Tan (dtch1997) · 2025-01-24T23:16:49.999Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Imagining the future
  Current systems restrict adoption 
  AI-first product development
  "Soft" disempowerment
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Language models are really powerful and will continue to get more powerful. So what might the future of language model usage look like? 

Imagining the future

A lot of our thinking about this is probably cached in current reality and hard to update. So I'll attempt to forcibly update this view by imagining very concrete things that might be possible in the future. 

Here are some things people likely already do. 

• Instead of reading a long piece of text, you might give a book to an LLM and ask it questions about things you want to know.
• Instead of writing an essay, you might draft some points and ask an LLM to format it into prose. 

Here's some other things that seem doable in the near future, given current rates of progress. 

• Instead of you manually deciding what to do, you might give an LLM access to a large collection of tasks you've written at some point and ask it for a small subset to do today.
• Instead of writing a script, an LLM might live in your terminal and ingest natural language commands, then do "just-in-time coding" to execute them.   
• Instead of browsing the Internet, an LLM might live in your browser and deliver you a personalized 'feed' of relevant information aggregated from everywhere in the world.
• Instead of you going on Netflix, an LLM might just write a new movie for you based on your preferences, or according to a specification. This generalises to other kinds of media like books, plays, music, etc.

More generally, LLMs might take over most of the complexity of managing your daily life; deciding what food you order, your agenda for the day, which people you meet, the kinds of media you consume. The age of the 'personal LLM assistant' is not that far off. However, 'assistant' is probably a misnomer. A better phrase might be 'personal LLM overseer'. 

Current systems restrict adoption 

Given that most of the things we do have an obviously better LLM equivalent, why haven't we seen broader adoption? 

It must first be acknowledged that current adoption is low because of mundane reasons like reliability and lack of infrastructure. However, these are transient issues. Furthermore, I think they are overblown - most people could get way more useful work out of language models than they currently do, if they really tried. 

The main problem is just inertia. Existing systems are just poorly designed to take advantage of this. They were designed in a world that didn't have extremely cheap and powerful machine intelligence, and must be re-designed from the ground up accordingly. 

Language models have so much potential. They won't just be assistants or tools. Consider the five senses we use to experience the world. There's no reason why all of those can't be replaced by language models generating the  equivalent. Language models will form a 'base layer' over reality through which you perceive everything. C.f. Plato's cave.

AI-first product development

In the future it's likely that we'll design products explicitly for AI rather than for human consumption. Instead of websites and human-digestible reading we might just send information as bullet points, or as JSON objects, and trust the language model running on our local device to 'decompile' this into human-readable language.  

The modern world contains volumes of information orders of magnitude higher than what we can process. Making sense of this involves efficiently aggregating, distilling, and presenting this information in digestible chunks. Language models are likely to be able to do this way better than our existing systems can. 

"Soft" disempowerment

We often express concern that AI is likely to take over the world leading to "human disempowerment", and this phrase conjures up something like 1984. However, a functionally equivalent outcome is "soft disempowerment" of the kind seen in Brave New World, where we very willingly cede more and more control over their lives to AI simply because this is an objectively better experience.  

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