CONCEPT
The Judgment Gap
The new Gulf of Evaluation produced by AI—the distance between what the machine has generated and what the person can understand well enough to judge—which has expanded precisely as the Gulf of Execution collapsed.
For the entire history of human-computer interaction, the central design challenge was the
Gulf of Execution: the distance between what a person wanted to do and what the system allowed her to do. The history of interface design—from the command line to the graphical user interface to the touchscreen—was a sustained effort to narrow that gulf, to make the crossing easier. AI did not narrow the gulf. It eliminated it. The machine crossed over: it learned the person’s language, accepted her intentions in plain English, and returned working artifacts. The translation burden has, for the first time in the history of human-tool interaction, shifted from the person to the system. The cost of this gift is the judgment gap: the expansion of the
Gulf of Evaluation that has followed the collapse of the execution gulf. In the traditional model, the person who crossed the Gulf of Execution to construct an artifact acquired, through the act of construction, the understanding that