There's something uncanny about the fact that the chat interface—a technology over half a century old—has become the standard way to interact with AI. If you had asked people a few years ago what a successful, mass-market AI would look like, they probably would have said a robot or self-driving car or something similar. But no, it's mostly just text on a page.
I think this is a good thing. Written language isn't going anywhere. But the internet is special. It enables hypertext, which itself enables hypermedia: rich interfaces that combine text, graphics, images, audio, and video. The problem is that most of these media are strewn across the web with no unified way to search or interact with them, causing UI & UX problems. Since I work at a college, I'll borrow an example from there.
Suppose you're a student or researcher working on a difficult paper. You've got Microsoft Word sitting on top of a Safari browser with an ungodly amount of tabs open. You're drowning in JSTOR papers, Google searches, Wikipedia articles, email, and YouTube videos. There's also the obligatory tab or two for ChatGPT. As your juggling all of this context, you can probably feel your brain pressing up against your skull.
The solution to this (or at least a step towards it), is to collapse the context and bring AI closer to the user. My goal here was to create a context-preserving AI assistant that could understand and work within the user's current environment.
Highlight any text in this passage and two buttons will appear: the "Quick Help" button creates an instant explanation, while the "Ask" button allows you to pose a specific question to the AI about the selected text.
This tool currently only works on non-touch devices.
...but on Hegel, his 'idealist' predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man — 'man as man' — that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history. (Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man)