Comment by a4isms
Short reply:
I agree, it only goes half-way.
Elaboration:
I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."
Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.
Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.
Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.
> You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."
The next logical step is not using email (the old horse and carriage) at all.
You tell your AI what you want to communicate with whom. Your AI connects to their AI and their AI writes/speaks a summary in the format they prefer. Both AIs can take action on the contents. You skip the Gmail/Outlook middleman entirely at the cost of putting an AI model in the middle. Ideally the AI model is running locally not in the cloud, but we all know how that will turn out in practice.
Contact me if you want to invest some tens of millions in this idea! :)