# The command line and GUI replaced voice as an interaction model decades ago,
because for most tasks…

The sorry steady state of most large organizations (the SNAFU) is the direct
result of the flaws of natural language as an interaction…

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The command line and GUI replaced voice as an interaction model decades ago,
because for most tasks it’s easier to do it yourself than tell a secretary to
do it for you. (And make no mistake, much of the time secretaries were more
intelligent and capable than the people who commanded them.) Until the advent
of weakly superhuman artificial general intelligences, the absolute best case
for voice and natural language as an interaction model will be strictly worse
than instructing a human subordinate.

The sorry steady state of most large organizations (the SNAFU) is the direct
result of the flaws of natural language as an interaction model. As an
organization becomes more close-knit and efficient, jargon proliferates and
language becomes more exact for things that matter, until what people speak to
one another resembles one of the less well-thought-out programming languages
(perl, php, basic, fortran). In other words, the end goal of any natural
language interface (even between humans) is to become a command line
interface.

Of course, between humans, the learning curve is hidden because it is merged
with the organic emergence of a shared cant. But, this hiding of the learning
curve can only be performed once: people who come later to a community must
learn the language of that community. Why not standardize, when we can? After
all, machines aren’t very good at improvizing collaboratively generated
vocabularies based on implication but are very good at consistently
interpreting the same conventions the same way (and copying those conventions
exactly to other machines).

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [January 17,
2017](https://medium.com/p/d994ab8e189e).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-command-line-and-gui-replaced-
voice-as-an-interaction-model-decades-ago-because-for-most-tasks-d994ab8e189e)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.