Universal interface

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

The universal interface is a natural step to take if you already have a universal stream-based representation structure of all your information and how it relates together through time. But interestingly this idea of a generic stream-based interface has come and gone a few times over the years, probably most famously in the Google Wave product from back in 2009.

I'm not sure why the idea hasn't gained more traction, but it could well be due to the difficulty in maintaining connectivity across so many diverse and changing protocols, and possible also related to the fact that the idea opposes the general corporate agenda of reinforcing the "walled garden" model. In any case, I believe the "universal interface" is going to make a strong come-back now that AI can help us maintain, share and evolve our own interface paradigms amongst ourselves independently.

Specifically in the Organic Design context, the universal interface.... is an organisation interface... todo...

AI is playing an increasingly important role in connecting systems. It can understand foreign APIs from their documentation, and it knows how to make endpoints to such APIs in any clearly described executional context.

For example, an endpoint to the Wikipedia API can be made available in a Linode server if access credentials are available. This is a simple pattern, but its real power comes from how generically applicable it is with AI. In this context a language model can be used as a kind of "universal middleware".

Connection of diverse systems really is a perfect use-case for language models because interfaces are descriptions of communications behaviours in different languages used by various instances in the field. Connecting these interfaces together to abstract the resources they represent is a language-centric process, but yet is not completely deterministic (especially in the context of human interfaces), one-size-fits-all templates are impractical because things change too often and the diversity of requirements is too great.

So LLMs are the perfect tool to make possible a universal ontology of all the resources, interfaces and their instances and profiles etc.

A number of people, ourselves included, have envisaged the idea of such a "universal interface" or "everything app"....

• more exotic connectors can also be built that AI can then utilise such as a DOM connector that basically allows an URL to be present in the holon as a continuous browser DOM document session.
• and of course abstractions over those for representing web app states etc

Corporations are attempting to restrict API access to humans (or to charge large fees for non-human access), to try and mitigate the coming exodus of real human attention from their interfaces. But AIs can easily hack those systems by behaving like their human agents, and asking the human agents to renew sessions when necessary. So eventually I think they'll have to accept that the universal interface to all applications is inevitable.

AI can also convert between formats, or at least guide the development of such conversions. E.g. to aggregate or distribute posts in multiple social platforms.

AI can integrate UIs to present local session state

The holarchy is the category tree of connection patterns and abstractions, and the tree of associated instances being maintained.

The AI has a continuous root session that contains the entire history of the local holon including all the AI interaction over that time. Local instance in holons are like a CWD for interacting with AI in the holarchy.

AI could, without too much more trouble, suggest curations, warn of disorganisation (like repeated concepts), and help with relevant options.

The connections are bidirectional where possible, so the local representation can be an organisational interface.

A universal customisable interface over all our IT world, to be able to query, select and report on the information, and to activate pipelines (workflows) on schedule and in accord with reporting

If we think of the concept of an ideal universal operating system, it would be:

• can connect with all our data on our behalf
• an awesome user experience with variations to suit everyone
• completely libre: easily customisable, mergeable and shareable
• works, organises and searches transparently for us behind the scenes
• flexible querying, selecting and organising of "our stuff"
• easy reporting and assessing of what's going on
• management of opportunity and potential
• easy interaction with the wider community ecosystem and market
• managing presence in multiple networks of varying complexity (e.g. blogs, social, developer, biz)

• fitted representation
• shared ontology

See also

• Holarchy
• Artificial Intelligence