The Age of the User Experience
The perils of the internet era, Maslow's Hierarchy of Tech, AI powered invisible interfaces.
Abundance with no direction: the tragedy of the internet.
The internet gave us access to everything: every product, every song, every article, every person. But infinite access ≠ infinite value. Infinite access means we can technically find anything… yet we still struggle to find what we actually want. Only desires that we can perfectly reduce to the rigid search query frameworks of today can be entertained. Everything higher-level is totally discarded.
But we are abstract, multifaceted beings. Our lived experience is truly a celebration of that complexity: a journey of discovering who you are, what you love, how you will navigate the world in a way that creates meaning for yourself and others, the list goes on. The complexities of who we are, what we think, and what we desire, certainly doesn’t fit into the search boxes of today. For instance:
“What do I wear to my college graduation party? I’m the first in my family to make it this far. I want my younger siblings to see a strong example of what’s possible with hard work, and for my parents to finally see me as the adult I’ve become. But I still want to feel like me with my spark and edge. Something bold enough to show I’ve grown, but still youthful, still real. I want to fit in with my peers, but I don’t want to disappear into their world just to belong.”
Unfortunately we are still living in the internet age. So with no tools to support this thought, she instead settles for:
“white, dress, semi-formal.”
We’ve been forced to flatten ourselves into rigid search frameworks to access anything in the world. The result? The richness gets lost. The feeling gets flattened. You show up in the world dressed (literally and metaphorically) as someone you don’t truly identify with. You live in a home that isn’t exactly decorated to reflect you. You listen to songs that only mostly align with your inner state. You apply for a job that you’re satisfied enough with… You default to choices that are available instead of ones that are actually most aligned.
The internet can’t meet you where you are. But AI can.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Tech
How advancements in AI will continue to radically impact the world around us can be best understood by looking backwards:
Every major technological paradigm shift follows the same general pattern. First, it enables us to consume more of the world around us. Then, it enables us to create - thereby contributing to the world around us:
→ Tools let us hunt and gather, then farm and domesticate.
→ Machines let us consume things through affordability and access (loom, printing press, assembly line), then produce through growing mass production infrastructure and industry knowledge transfer.
→ The internet gave us access to virtually everything, then the tools to build anything (e-commerce, blogs, music software, etc.)
→ AI removes the final bottleneck: ourselves. It allows us to consume things that we are truly most aligned with, regardless of our ability to articulate or manually source our desires (clothing styles, music, information, art, etc.). Eventually it will empower us to contribute back to the world through pre-thought collaboration: where your intent, not your syntax, becomes the input.
Each leap made the world more available to us. Then it made us more powerful within it. AI is the next wave. But unlike the others, AI isn’t scaling access through greater abundance. It is narrowing abundance for sharpened relevance - helping you articulate the question rather than just fetching answers.
More thoughts below (I’m a visual thinker… lol):
The Age of The User Experience
So we’ve been playing the expanding access game for a while now… First to food and shelter (via tools), then to physical goods and texts (via machines), and finally to virtually everything else (via the internet). Now we’ve finally hit a ceiling (because access has become generally infinite). In the face of infinite access, our human limitations have become raw and exposed: we have everything in front of us, yet our human limitations make us struggle to extract even a fraction of its value. Our next hurdle to climb is no longer external - tools beat nature, machines beat bureaucracy, the internet beat institutions. Now our next barrier is internal, causing a hard, human-race level forced introspection. We are limited by our own minds: the impossibility of reading every Google result, the cognitive overload of endless options, the challenge of translating abstract thoughts into searchable keywords.
(***Hot take / side-note: in my opinion a lot of the animosity against AI stems from this forced introspection - now that machines handle menial tasks better / faster / cheaper, people have to confront the uncomfortable - but liberating - question of what uniquely human value they bring… Topic for another post.)
The TLDR: we think in squiggles, today’s internet search exists in blocks. AI matches our squiggles with… squiggles, leading to direct transference of thought to tangible access.
So the “Age of The User Experience” is defined by making the fruits of the world (that we’ve worked so hard to make accessible to us over the course of history), really accessible through the medium to which it is delivered to us. AKA (referencing the above image): making a world of boxes into a world of squiggles.
AI’s technical capabilities and abstract reasoning can match our human-level depth to create this smooth transference. This era goes beyond technical progress in a vacuum. It demands deep introspection: how do our behaviors, instincts, and psychology translate into pixels—and eventually, into something that transcends pixels altogether? AI can productize squiggles. But reimagining everything and producing squiggles requires a total rethinking of how we design products, build brands, and apply innovation - not just technically, but humanly.
Take chatGPT for example:
I was an avid user of OpenAI’s GPT-3, pre-chatGPT era. I found it impossibly frustrating to experience its capabilities firsthand and recognize the potential for its massive global impact, yet it was being completely passed over as a “technical” product… Essentially barring it from any path to mass adoption. (I even ended up building a humanized chatbot using the GPT-3 backend right before the release of chatGPT to try to show my family/friends that this is a tool unlike anything we’ve ever seen before with “human-like” capabilities… see here in Vogue).
Enter chatGPT. Enter one million users in five days (400 million per week today). Contrast that with the “tens of thousands of developers” building on GPT-3 nine months in. So was GPT-3.5 (the model originally powering chatGPT) such a revolutionary jump from its predecessor GPT-3, that it warranted this insane spike in traffic? Of course not. The revolution was in this difference:
While the functional or infrastructural improvements from historical LLMs are necessary and incredibly valuable in driving AI tools forward, these advancements alone are not a revolution…. When a cold search bar is replaced by a computer saying “hello”, that is the revolution.
The future
Tools gave us food and shelter. Machines gave us goods and infrastructure. The internet gave us information and platforms.
AI gives us ourselves.
Loved this! The shift to experience-centered ecosystems is fascinating. In a world of infinite choices, the best experience wins. Thanks for articulating this so clearly.