Schrödinger's Chat: An intelligence is both artificial and not until being observed.

This talk discusses the history and future of text interfaces, helpful and otherwise, real and imaginary. By drawing a line through command-line interfaces, ELIZA, Markov chains, text adventures, Neal Stephenson, Siri, Slack and all points in between, we will attempt to understand the user experience of generally useful textual experiences, regardless of their intelligence. With this lens, we can then observe the near future that LLMs will bring, and what may or may not be transformed as a result.