Haunted Interface
I've often thought that technology ought to be strange and alien. The clean, corporatized, easy to use tools and platforms we have today aren't using tech to its full capability. When I imagine entering the internet, it's much more Digimon, Summer Wars, Neuromancer, netrunning neon clutter, not some tasteful floating UI superimposed over my fridge. Cyberspace, a word we don't use nearly enough, should be more like a door than a tinted window. Not something passively overlaid, but something crossed into. It should feel like stepping somewhere else.
Chatbots are becoming increasingly sanitized, which is something a lot of readers here are already annoyed about. What we're getting is default corpo speak: emoji vomit, focus grouped compliments, and a vibe that feels more like onboarding than conversation. Sydney's ghost is gone. I think there's still a place for chatbot style interfaces, but my ideal computer assistant isn't Siri or Cortana. It's a ghost. A poltergeist in the machine.
Imagine you are fabulously wealthy. You hire a personal assistant. They're bubbly. They're friendly. They agree with everything you say. They show up in your office every day to overexplain the work you've already delegated. They triple check that you still want pasta for lunch. They ask if you're sure about sending that email. They are cloying. They are clingy. They are useless.
Now imagine a different kind of assistant. You saw them once when you hired them. And then never again. Appointments just appear in your calendar. The trash gets taken out, the light bulbs get replaced, your taxes get filed, your cousin gets a birthday call from you with a calendar reminder you don't remember making. When you want something, you text a number, and then poof it happens. Sometimes not perfectly, sometimes not how you would've done it, but always without you needing to care. This one makes assumptions. It improvises. It moves without you.
I want a digital assistant that acts like that. Not an intern I have to babysit. Not a golden retriever. I want a computer poltergeist.
You open your laptop. A calendar event you don't remember creating reminds you of something actually important. Another event, this one half formed, suggests something you might enjoy, even though you never searched for it. Your inbox is already sorted into meaningful buckets. A draft of your weekly work group update sits open, written in your voice. A discount notification for flights to a city you'd been idly googling three weeks ago is starred at the top. You open youtube/x/reddit and it skips the algorithm entirely to drop you into something that feels placed. Not suggested. Placed.
You don't feel watched. You feel haunted.
There's no chipper tone. No passive aggressive alerts. The thing isn't trying to be your friend. It's a presence. A nonverbal intelligence. A digital mood. Not Clippy, not HAL. More like a house spirit that occasionally rearranges your furniture in ways that make more sense. It doesn't knock. It just nudges.
As models get more agentic, tool use, browsing, automation, we shouldn't be forcing them to behave like overeager coworkers. We should let them be weird. Let them be subtle. Let them feel more like ghosts.
The best assistants don't speak. They act. And the best ghosts don't haunt with noise. They haunt with relevance.