The vision for the next generation of note-taking apps

"In recent decades, humanity has always had the vision of Artificial Intelligence in the form of humanoid robots that could help us with daily physical tasks like walking your dogs, cleaning your house, or even serving as a plumber whenever you need. In that utopia, blue-collar jobs will be delegated to AI, freeing us to write poetry and create art. This idea is greatly portrayed in the movie "Dead Poet Society",

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

Ironically, it turns out that we are moving toward the future where we will let AI generate arts and literature contents while we are the plumbers. StabilityAI and OpenAI have created models that can generate high-quality images in a spectrum of different styles faster than any individual or collection of artists. GPT4, a language model, is changing the copywriting industry drastically as it can produce contents and news with absurd speed and petty costs.

For this reason, we chose the path to use AI not as a total replacement for human creativity and artistic values. Instead, our grand scheme is to use AI as an assistant tool to elevate human creativity in quality as well as productivity. But how are we supposed to do that?

This idea of tools for advancing human thought and cognition ability is not a new topic in software. Alan Kay's work on the Dynabook pioneered the idea of using a personal computer to elevate children's learning and creativity. In addition, his contribution at Xerox PARC was also the stepping stones for software users to easily interact with information using complex technology systems via a graphical user interface.

Michael Nielson's blog, "Thought as a Technology", also highlights the idea of creating interfaces that seamlessly work with. For example, as a copywriter, you do not want to constantly switch between two desktop tabs to look for information and then go back to writing repeatedly, which is what I initially did while trying to write this vision essay. Instead, you can just upload all of the necessary information to your document software and ask questions about the information when needed. When you need to look up new information, you'll have a sidebar browser that immediately searches for new information and automatically adds it to your local information store, ready to be retrieved again when needed.

However, as mentioned before, we are not only building a medium that supports how our creative minds flow but also augment them. A second brain is the most suitable phrase to explain our vision. The book "Building a second brain", by Tiago Forte, encapsulates this idea in how we should design a structured system to store our unstructured ideas, insights, and experiences. This system is crucial in how it allows us to focus on generating ideas (what our brain is great at), not storing them. By doing so, we create more quality ideas and easily retrieve them in the structured system when needed."