We're witnessing the spread of social trend I've been calling API-ification. This isn't a new trend, but has previously only been available to the few.
By API-ification, I mean a person exposes well-defined processes for interfacing with that person. For most of history, only high-demand people such as politicians, CEOs, celebrities had access to this ability, by having "people" who act as the API.
Want to get dinner with the CEO of XYZ Corp? Call his assistant and they'll find a date to slot you in. Want to get a draft bill sent to your congressman? Send it to this address and the mail boy will sort it.
Technology — particularly software technology — has been allowing the masses to take part in this API-ification trend. People increasingly expose well-defined APIs to the outside world, and call the APIs of other people.
Consider Calendly, a scheduling tool. You want to meet up? Coffee chat? Video call? Here's my Calendly, put some time on my calendar. I've just vended a calendar API.
Tinder is a "flirt with me" API. AirBnB is a "rent my place" API. Craigslist is a "buy my stuff" API. Venmo is a "pay me" API. You get the idea.
These tools are all narrow-domains that consumers select off-the-shelf (off-the-app-store?), but the tools like AWS, Cloudflare, Zapier, Stripe, and others are making new API-ification apps easier to build every year. And increasingly, ChatGPT et al are also pretty good at gluing these services together to build new apps. We're moving up the API-ification infrastructure ladder.
The next layer of infrastructure will be AI assistants that use those APIs as tools. An AI assistant is a fuzzy replacement for the crisply-defined existing apps. Some traditional apps will continue to exist, but AI assistants will be the everything-app for all the personal APIs people want to create that aren't easily representable with off-the-shelf apps.
I'll be able to tell my AI assistant "accept up to 2 arbitrary coffee meetups between 8 and 9 AM per week from anyone who is a friend of a friend, and any number from friends, but only up to 1 per day, unless the both people would be comfortable doubling up for a group of three".
That's a pretty sophisticated API boundary that would be nearly impossible to represent with Calendly.
I'll be able to say "if any of my friends ask to see any of my vacation pictures, send them any that would be appropriate to post in public". It will know to send the pictures of the Eiffel Tower and not send the one my wife took of me dancing in the hotel bathrobe.
On the other end of this, my friends will be able to tell their AI "once a day, ask my friends if they have any interesting photos to share. Show me the pictures of pets, and of cool places. Don't show any food pictures."
Their AI automation will talk to the API I set up, and voila, we've just obviated a large part of Instagram with a few sentences!
While this next phase seems pretty clear, it's difficult to see if there is yet another phase beyond that, or if increasingly good AI assistants are simply the end-state.