The case against conversational interfaces

This clearly elucidated a number of things I've tried to explain to people who are so excited about "conversations" with computers. The example I've used (with varying levels of effectiveness) was to get someone to think about driving their car by only talking to it. Not a self driving car that does the driving for you, but telling it things like: turn, accelerate, stop, slow down, speed up, put on the blinker, turn off the blinker, etc. It would be annoying and painful and you couldn't talk to your passenger while you were "driving" because that might make the car do something weird. My point, and I think it was the author's as well, is that you aren't "conversing" with your computer, you are making it do what you want. There are simpler, faster, and more effective ways to do that then to talk at it with natural language.

You're onto something. We've learned to make computers and electronic devices feel like extensions of ourselves. We move our bodies and they do what we expect. Having to switch now to using our voice breaks that connection. Its no longer an extension of ourselves but a thing we interact with.

Two key things that make computers useful, specificity and exactitude, are thrown out of the window by interposing NLP between the person and the computer.

I don't get it at all.

   [imprecise thinking]
         v <--- LLMs do this for you
   [specific and exact commands]
         v
   [computers]
         v
   [specific and exact output]
         v <--- LLMs do this for you
   [contextualized output]

In many cases, you don't want or need that. In some, you do. Use right tool for the job, etc.

Despite feeling like a "let me draw it for you" answer is a tad condescending, I want to address something here.

This would be great if LLMs did not tend to output nonsense. Truly it would be grand. But they do. So it isn't. It's wasting resources hoping for a good outcome and risking frustration, misapprehensions, prompt injection attacks... It's non-deterministic algorithms hoping P=NP, except instead of branching at every decision you're doing search by tweaking vectors whose values you don't even know and whose influence on the outcome is impossible to foresee.

Sure, a VC subsidized LLM is a great way to make CVs in LaTeX (I do it all the time), translating text, maybe even generating some code if you know what you need and can describe it well. I will give you that. I even created a few - very mediocre - songs. Am I contradicting myself? I don't think I am, because I would love to live in a hotel if I only had to pay a tiny fraction of the cost. But I would still think that building hotels would be a horrible way to address the housing crisis in modern metropolises.

Using the word hotel has a lot of baggage, but having a large quantity of rooms for rent, for cheap, with a bathroom but no dedicated kitchen would be amazing for the housing crisis. If they were high quality and sound isolated, with high speed elevators, and communal spaces for residents, it could work. I'm not an architect though.