For the decades we have used modern machines, we have needed to learn how to create and speak their languages.

Points: For the first time, AI can understand human intent. What do we mean by “understand” instead of “compute?” It can respond to some notion of the way human language semantics work.

We don’t have to get the exact command and data formatted properly anymore; all we need to do now is express ourselves more naturally.

There’s value in still being formal and structured in how we express ourselves.

But humans get things wrong. And so will AI.

Machines have had a peculiar effect on us. Even though we humans invent them, they seem to take on a conceptual life of their own that we must then, in turn, adapt to.

When Henry Ford’s Model T hit the market, this spawned not only a revolution in personal transportation and started the sublime and devastating changes in the physical landscape of the United States, it created an entirely new automotive language, one that consumers needed to learn to operate such machines, and one a new profession developed to repair and maintain them.

The novel quickly became the mundane, and talk of steering wheels, engines, cylinders, octane, and the like became commonplace conversation, then embedded culture.

And this is how technology has always evolved. New products and platforms emerge, and as dutiful humans often defined by our implements, we learn how to use them, learn their words, their concepts, their limitations. We even develop fanaticism around them, emotional connections often more precious than those we have with other humans.

I think AI is different. AI has enabled computers to speak human, which can supplant hundreds of years of humans learning how to speak machine.

While apps like ChatGPT still use data entry as a UI paradigm, entering crafted prompts (and if you “pop the hood,” so to speak, tweaking parameters, too) to serve as a starting point for a large language model to take over, this is just momentum from an industry that has treated data entry as the dominant UI paradigm since modern computers were invented.

But implicit in the treatment of those prompts is something novel again. Machines can “understand” our intent without presuming that intent.