AI innovation is a symptom of poor systemic innovation – AKA I want noodles and coffee

I am currently both hungry and wanting a barista coffee. My phone was just put on charging at 0% battery, and I need it to charge as much as possible so that I can bring it with me later today and not have to worry about the battery running out. I also hate navigating on a small phone screen when there is a large computer screen availabe, so picking the phone up to use it would enfuriate me, especially considering I am both hungry and in need of caffeine.

Sometimes it helps and can be fun to just write something simple for oneself. With something written, which was interesting for the writer, it can be beneficial to share it with others, with there being a probability that it may be interisting for some others as well. The problem is that others may think the writer to be weird, or not see the coherence between the writers more selfish writings and their normal writings, making the writer seem incoherent or unfocused. On this topic, I have decided that I would rather share too much than too little, and I’m choosing to publish this small blog post, knowing it might not fit that well in with my other content.

I could just grit my teeth and pick up my phone. I know how to order a coffee for take-away. The problem is, I don’t know the exact way to order the specific food I am craving. There is a noodle shop just by my building, and they have great noodles. Whenever I sit down there, I scan a QR code to open a «mini-program» to order to my table. I’m not sure what the exact mini-program is called, but I’m sure I could find it again, if I just go to the WeChat mini-programs tab and look through the recent mini-programs. I could also take a look at aMap and find the name of the location there to aid my search. And if the application doesn’t support delivery itself, I could try to search up the place in the larger delivery-app to see if they support it, but I’m not guaranteed to find it there either.

For some reason, the contact point of both the noodle shop and the coffee place, is an app on your phone. There is no good pc or even voice assistant or other contact point equivalent. And current options for streaming apps to Windows from Android phones are lacking. Why is it that a food and/or drinks store, has to conciously choose a specific contact point at all, and why is it a commitment? And why isn’t it possible to go to order from them straight from aMap? The only information I need from this noodle place, is their selection of dishes, their prices, and to be able to place an order. This basic information and being able to place an order could be put into any wrapping. It could be surfaced on a webpage, directly in the maps app, or even in a voice assistant.

I am now less angry and frustrated, and my phone is charged, so I will just go ahead and head out of my apartment, show up physically at the noodle store to eat something, and survive without the coffee.

The reason AI is getting so much traction is not because it itself is the best solution to all of our problems, it is because we can employ it without having to un-entangle all of our existing messy systems. AI can ingest a lot of messy information, and spit out something more coherent. If only our society was a bit more coherent from the get go…

I can’t wait for an AI assistant to be able to do a google search, navigate a web page, find and choose some items I probably like, enter my information and go through the ordering process, and end up having bought something on my behalf. Still, that whole agentic workflow could have been skipped by the vendor offering their services a bit more universally. One problem is that all of these platforms that we use, want to «lock us in», and we let them. With time all of the current platforms we use may become a lock solely for the vendor side of things, and be degraded to a layer in the technology stack serving information to our AI agents. Time will tell.