In the late 19th century, cities faced a mounting challenge: horse manure disposal. The Times, in 1894, painted a bleak picture, predicting that "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure." The logic was simple - more horses meant more manure, and more manure meant more horses needed to remove it, creating a vicious cycle.
This example from history highlights the danger of extrapolating problems based on current trends without considering technological advancements. The first efficient internal combustion engine was introduced in 1877, and Daimler sold its first car in 1892 - yet nobody in 1894 noticed this. Fortunately, our predecessors avoided applying flawed logic even further, such as proposing to use engines to remove manure. It would have been doubly naive to apply revolutionary technology to solve problems that would soon be eliminated by that same technology.
Fast forward to 2023, and we are witnessing a similar trap with the use of GPT to generate complex websites. Several startups are utilizing GPT to generate websites from sketches, particularly with respect to search forms and complex navigation. OpenAI even demonstrated a simple version of this use-case at a recent conference when announcing GPT-4.
But here is the thing: GPT will completely transform the way we build web interfaces, as evidenced by the simplicity of chat.openai.com design. In just a few years, I predict that most interfaces will adopt this design, and we will bid farewell to complex search forms, drop-down menus, and other clunky UI elements. Long gone will be the days when chatbot windows timidly peeped from the corner of the screen - tomorrow, they will take center stage. In the past, they almost never worked well, so it is no wonder they were not given a prominent place.
In the near future, we will simply type or speak what we want, and the answers will be presented in a variety of formats - text, video, images, interactive charts, maps, and more. Some efforts of the aforementioned startups may not be misplaced, particularly when it comes to generating code for rendering answers to our questions, but much will be in vain. The good news is that soon we can expect simpler and more user-friendly versions of our favorite websites, like Expedia and Zillow.
Just as the internal combustion engine rendered the problem of horse manure disposal obsolete, GPT will make the current clunky web interfaces antiquated, creating a more seamless, intuitive, and accommodating online landscape.