AI Obsoletes UI
What does this mean for security?
UI/UX is bad. It’s so bad. It’s bad everywhere. Where is the goddamn button to do the thing I want to do? How much crack was the UI/UX designer on when they built this thing?
Oh, you don’t even have a UI designer, your engineers built the UI. LOL OK. Let’s require users read a hundred-page manual before they can complete a basic task. (Pro tip: If your product or software comes with a manual, or labels like Push and Pull on doors, you already failed UI/UX 101.)
BUT! AI makes this problem go away (and creates a whole set of new problems, including security problems).
I often find myself pasting screenshots of bad UIs into Claude and asking “where is the menu option to do X? I can’t find it”. And Claude knows.
But the future is better than that (also worse, but we’ll get there).
“Hey AI, go do the thing I want to do.”
The AI interfaces with the service API and does the thing you want to do.
AI replaces UI in the medium term.
So if you’re working in UI/UX design right now, I’d be very worried about job security.
Of course, some UIs are more sensitive than others. Connecting agentic AI to higher security systems is definitely not production ready. But it will get better, and after the early big wins we’ll see AI grind it out security-wise.
The highest security UIs may never get agentic AI--we might reasonably say some tasks are so sensitive that an AI can never access them. Only humans allowed. But that will be a tiny minority of computer systems overall.
From a security point of view, this has multiple consequences I can think of, plus some I’m quite sure I have not yet thought of.
First, once median AI performance significantly exceeds median human performance, the UI disappears completely, especially for lower to medium security tasks.
Second, AI will always involve long-tail black swan systemic risk. Replacing UI with AI increases overall systemic AI risk. Modern LLMs are capable of faking reason, but it is not at all clear they are capable of true understanding--without which, much can go wrong.
Third, API security becomes paramount. API usage will 10x or more as AIs seek to both read data as well as do things in both software as well as the real world that software increasingly controls.
And Fourth? I don’t know. The first order effect, namely that AI deprecates UI, is crystal clear. The second and third order effects this will have are reasonably in focus for me. But what am I missing? Let me know in the comments, or reply to this email.