Aza Raskin
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Aza Raskin. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Aza Raskin's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The feature that changed everything was designed in an afternoon.
That fact should stop you cold. It stops me every time I return to it. Aza Raskin was twenty-two when he designed infinite scroll — a small, elegant solution to a small, elegant problem. The bottom of the webpage was a seam, a place where the user's attention snagged on the architecture of the interface. He smoothed it away. The content flowed. The seam vanished.
two hundred thousand human lifetimes per day. That is Raskin's own estimate of what infinite scroll now consumes. The designer who removed a seam from a webpage accidentally removed the moment at which billions of people would have otherwise paused, reconsidered, and chosen what to do next.
I think about
