Let me tell you a story about how society adopts new technologies, and what that tells us about the changes we’re living through right now.
On March 5, 2009, Firemint released Flight Control, a deceptively simple game where you drew lines with your finger to guide planes to their landing strips. It was a hit.Watch a young child with a smartphone today and you’ll see how naturally they grasp these interfaces, swiping and tapping with innate confidence, mastering voice controls faster than any adult. But in 2009, we were all still learning – even the people creating the software struggled to imagine how it should work.
Rewind to 2006, when Jeff Han gave his landmark TED talk introducing multi-touch interfaces to the world. The technology was revolutionary, but the gap between technical possibility and intuitive use was vast. When the iPhone launched a year later, most apps were awkward ports of websites or desktop software, still thinking in terms of mouse clicks. Sure, we had pinch-to-zoom, the first gesture everyone learned, but developers and users alike were just beginning to explore what was possible.
Flight Control cracked something fundamental. It didn’t try to translate mouse clicks or keyboard commands – it embraced the natural gesture of drawing a path. You wanted a plane to go somewhere? Just draw the line. It was simple in retrospect, but it took a while to get there. This wasn’t just a game mechanic; it was a breakthrough in what people understood about how interacting with computers worked. The interface disappeared, and direct manipulation emerged.
Each new innovation built on the last, as people’s understanding of what was possible expanded alongside the technology itself.
But here’s the thing about technological revolutions: the first breakthrough is rarely the final destination. Touch interfaces were necessary for smartphones to succeed, but they weren’t sufficient. The real transformation came when phones combined touch with cameras, GPS, and payment processing. That front-facing camera enabled video calls. GPS unlocked location-based services. Payment processing turned phones into commerce platforms. Each addition expanded what was possible, and businesses built entirely new services on this foundation.
The killer apps weren’t games – they were video calls to grandma, group chats with friends, and the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, instantly and freely. The technology became truly transformative when it enabled new forms of human connection.
We’re living through a similar moment now with AI interfaces. Watch a modern AI chat system think in real-time, revealing its work letter by letter. See how tools like DeepSeek expose their entire thought process, helping users understand and internalize how the system works. Experience how image generation tools like Midjourney transform rough text descriptions into vivid visuals, while voice synthesis from ElevenLabs gives machines the power of natural speech. This isn’t just about text boxes and prompts – it’s about language, understanding, and thought itself.
The pace is dizzying, far faster than our native expectations of how technology should evolve. That’s because we’re not just switching input methods, like going from keyboard to mouse to touch. We’re pushing at the boundaries of thought and knowledge themselves, challenging assumptions we didn’t even know we had. Some current AI models are, for specific tasks, already outperforming most humans. But raw intelligence isn’t everything – if it were, society would look very different.
What matters is how these tools embed themselves in our lives, how they transform our understanding of what’s possible. Just as Flight Control helped us grasp the potential of touch interfaces, today’s experiments with AI are helping us imagine new ways of thinking with machines. We’re not just witnessing technological progress – we’re participating in a fundamental reimagining of human-computer interaction.
And this time, we’re not just learning to draw lines on screens. We’re learning to think together with our tools, pushing the boundaries of what both humans and machines can achieve. The revolution isn’t just in the technology – it’s in our growing understanding of what’s possible, and how these tools can enhance rather than replace human capabilities. We’re in an exploration phase, discovering not just what these systems can do, but how they fit into the broader tapestry of human society and cognition.
Its still very early.
Will Schenk February 11, 2025
