@rafd: That's funny. I did an Industrial Design project at university where I had to design a Rice Cooker. I included the design of being able to chat to the rice cooker (multi-cooker). Things like I'll be 30 mins late which would be responded with things like Ok I will keep it warm when it finishes etc. The tutors/lecturers didn't think it was a good idea and got fairly average marks. This was over a year ago I did that assignment.

It will be interesting to see the transition from dumb command interfaces (ex. unix commandline) and smart conversational AI ones... the approach companies seem to be taking is "fake it with real humans until the AI works"

...but I still think there will be huge value in 2d interfaces because of the data-density and specificity they support

I agree. While Elixir will be riding some of the success in the chat boom due to its underlying run time reputation. The whole essence of this chat trend is that it will need serious AI to live up to what people are expecting chat to become. Which Lisp has deep history with. I mentioned all this when I first shared that Future of Text article. It's something I find very interesting.

is Elixir really tied up with the chat world specifically? I haven’t seen much talk of chat apps in Elixir circles.

I get the connection through the OTP/telecoms background, just hadn’t realized Elixir had already established a reputation in chat apps specifically.