Picture under Glass requires more than just your hands — it requires your eyes too. You can’t navigate Picture under Glass without looking at where your fingers are as there is no touch feedback from the screen. With analog buttons, you can ‘feel’ your way around an interface, for example modern cars only have a mounted tablet as the car entertainment system, and sometimes when I’m driving and I want to skip the song, there is no safe way for me to do so without having to momentary take my eyes off the road to look at the tablet to see where the ‘>’ next song button is. In older cars with analog buttons, I don’t have to look at it to know where the button is, I can just remember that the next song button is the second from the right, and with one hand on the wheel and eyes on the road, I can interact with the car entertainment system.
I also found it interesting that in his follow up he brought up this hypothetical scenario of “Monet saying to his canvas, “Give me some water lilies. Make ’em impressionistic.”. Today with the existence of generative AI and advanced natural language processing units, it seems that the world of user interfaces has doubled down on the direction of Picture under Glass, further reducing the number of middlemen between the intent of the brain, and the wanted outcome. What I mean by this is that hands/physical movements are in some parts, a means to an end. To open a jar, we use our hands to open it because we can’t simply use our brain to open it. People spend years in art school to learn how to draw well, but generative art can accomplish what would take an untrained artist years of training to achieve in a singular sentence and a few minutes. ChatGPT further reduces the effort needed by humans to interface with the world — in the past, one would have to visit a library to read about a specific subject. Then came the internet, and using devices connected to the internet, one can search Google for the information they need. Now with ChatGPT, you can just simply ask it about whatever you need. The effort needed to accomplish anything is reduced, and I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. On this, the author says that “if they [brain interfaces] bypass the body, then we’ve just created a future where people can and will spend their lives completely immobile. Why do you want this future? Why would this be a good thing?”