The Interface for AI Hasn't Been Invented Yet - by Iris
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The Interface for AI Hasn't Been Invented Yet<br>Telepath founder Stephen Hood on why the desktop metaphor stuck, why chat won't, and what comes next
Iris<br>Jun 03, 2026
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There is a story Stephen Hood likes to tell about the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation.<br>It is 1989. Actor Wil Wheaton, who plays the teenage prodigy Wesley Crusher, occasionally pilots the Enterprise. On the show that means sitting at the helm and tapping a flat black panel covered in glassy slabs and abstract symbols. Star Trek’s famous LCARS interface. There is no stick, no yoke, no instruction manual. So Wheaton invents his own gestures: a flick here, a tap there, a small flourish to indicate course correction. After a while, he starts to wonder if he is doing it wrong.<br>He finds the production designer, Michael Okuda, and asks. Okuda has spent years building Star Trek’s visual language; if anyone knows the right way to fly a starship, it is him.<br>Okuda tells him there is no right way. In the future, the interface will adapt to the user. Wheaton’s gestures are correct because they are Wesley’s gestures. When other actors take the helm, theirs will be different, and that won’t matter.<br>That was 1989. The Mac was five years old. The web was two years away. There were no smartphones, no broadband, no machine learning to speak of. And a television production designer, working out the logic of a fictional starship, had articulated something that most of the actual computing industry would spend the next thirty-seven years reaching for.
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Telepath Founders Josh Whiting, Stephen Hood & Rupert Manfredi<br>Stephen Hood thinks about this story a lot. Telepath, his fourth startup, was founded late last year with Rupert Manfredi and Josh Whiting, two former colleagues from Mozilla, where he had previously led open source AI work and helped ship a project called Llamafile. He keeps vintage computers on his desk. He talks about the history of personal computing the way some people talk about jazz.<br>What he sees, when he looks at the modern computer, is a Jenga tower.<br>“It’s an unstable, wobbly, tall structure that we built over decades of accrued assumptions and decisions,” he says. The desktop, the windows, the icons, the menus. None of it is the platonic ideal of how humans and machines should interact. It’s just what got built, decision by decision, working around the limitations of the machines available at each step.<br>It was also working around the fact that people did not know what a computer could do, and were a little afraid of it. Designers borrowed from the physical world to make the machine feel familiar: the screen became a desk, files became paper documents stacked in folders, deletion became a trash can you dragged things into. The conceit was that you were not really using a computer. You were sitting at a desk, moving objects around. It made the machine discoverable for people who had never used one.<br>One of Hood’s advisors is Scott Jenson, who joined Apple’s Human Interface group in the late 1980s and went on to work on design for Google, and Frog Design. At the Ubuntu Summit last year, Jenson argued that desktop UX has not meaningfully changed in twenty years. The interface most of us still use, he pointed out, traces back to the Xerox Star prototype from 1981; everything since has been a copy of a copy. His complaint was not that the metaphor was wrong. It was that desktop design had always evolved by copying the previous generation, and the field has now spent two decades copying itself.<br>Hood’s argument goes further. He thinks the conditions that produced the desktop metaphor in the first place no longer hold. Most computer users today have grown up with computers; they don’t need a metaphor to picture what a file is. The metaphor solved problems we mostly don’t have anymore. And the machine can now respond, observe, and adjust in ways it couldn’t in 1984.
But the industry’s first instinct, having been handed this new capability, has been to put it inside a chat box.<br>Hood finds this insufficient. “Everything is based around chat today,” he says. “Even things like Cowork, which is a great, amazing project. It’s still fundamentally a chat experience.” He is not knocking the projects. He is pointing out that chat is what we have because it is the easiest thing to ship, not because it is the right interface for what is actually happening underneath. He calls it a return to the command line.<br>The problem with a chat log, in Hood’s view, is that it flattens everything. Every project, every task, every half-finished thought becomes a line in the same scrolling ticker. A linear scrolling log. People try to use chat threads as projects, but threads don’t really map to projects. They accumulate, drift, get abandoned, mix together. Information you needed an hour ago becomes hard to find again. Context evaporates.<br>He thinks the next...