Believe me, it works.

Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, had a horseshoe hanging above the door of his home. One day, a visitor spotted it and, curious, asked, “Surely, Professor, you don’t believe in that superstition, do you?”

Bohr smiled and replied, “Of course not. But I’ve heard it works whether you believe in it or not!”

Belief is a strange thing. It is often opposed to cynicism or disbelief. But here, Niels Bohr portrays a third position: belief-despite-disbelief. And paradoxical though it may seem, it teaches us something valuable about how we design AI experiences.

Let me explain.

The natural habitat of the polar bear is the Arctic. The natural habitat of the scorpion is the desert. But what about humans? What is our natural habitat? Technology.

Technology affords us clothing to extend our skin’s ability to stay warm in the cold. It affords us glasses to extend our eyesight, and shoes to extend our ability to walk long distances. For millions of years, we have inhabited the world technologically. It impacts us ontologically.

Our natural habitat, our most “natural” mode of inhabitation, is artificiality itself. Through artificial means, the whole planet became a viable place for humans to live. We’ve extended our bodies and our minds—from sticks and stones to extend our hunting abilities, to the Hubble telescope, which extends our optic nerve to the edges of the visible cosmos. And if you look around your surroundings right now, it is likely that you are the most “natural” thing in it.

But now that, in partnership with technology, we have taken over the entire planet—often in a clumsy, unsustainable, and exploitative way—progress is finding a new frontier. It is turning inward.

Because, as you know, technology also affords us ways to think, to feel and to communicate. The internet, the computer, the television or the radio are impactful because they extend our minds and our cognition. Before that, the printing press did the same. And before that, the writing did the same. And before that... language.

Language can be said to be the most revolutionary technology we’ve ever discovered/created. It’s a foundational part of the “human habitat”. We inhabit a house of language; our very evolution as a species happened in the shape of its affordances, and in return, within it, you can see the shape of our needs, our psyche, and our history. Some even claim that language is a part of the human body, just like our hair or our nails.

But we use language as much as language uses us; we can only go as far as it allows us. Our actions are always conditioned by it. It is the water, and we are the fish. Wether you believe in its power or not, it still works, because it is the very technological means of how we currently perceive reality. There is a paradox in trying to communicate experiences beyond language, because, well, you’d be using language to communicate.

Houses exist in the shape of human needs - and so does language. Houses have kitchens for eating, toilets for hygiene, and bedrooms for sleeping because our bodies need them. Likewise, language expresses identity, memory, agreements, and beliefs.

As psychoanalysts suggest, language is full of symptoms. In it, we can read the complexes of the psyche, the desires of the unconscious, and the structure of the personality. If you know where to look, it’s full of hidden meaning.

But language is undergoing a technological revolution. By disrupting our interface with language, GenAI sows the seeds for disruption in psychology - far beyond what we saw in the digital age.

The 21st century demands an ontological view of the role of language and technology. Language, as a primary form of technology, “works whether we believe in it or not” because its shape closely tracks the shape of our psyche. It is a psychotechnology.

That is why the GenAI revolution is, in fact, a psychological revolution. As it changes our relationship with language, it will also change our relationship with ourselves. Our habitat is changing once again; and with it, so are we.

It is this hypnotic spell-craft that I want to explore in conversational AI. And although the design world might be in crisis in 2024—disciplinary boundaries are fuzzy, design has been templatized, best practices are defined, the tech bubble is correcting, and the ROI of design is questioned at every turn—this does not mean its task in the world is over. In fact, it has only just begun.

It is not just a matter of AI going to “changing industry”. Because they change our relationship with language, large language models are changing our relationship with reality. They are not just a disruptive technology, they are a disruption in psychotechnology.

It is then time to say, boldly, that through language, we want to design reality: psychological reality, attentional reality, human reality. For particular humans, in particular situations, relations and challenges. This is the vision.

Because whether you believe it or not, it still works.

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