From The Ongoing Computer Revolution, Butler Lampson (emphasis mine):
Xerox asked us to invent the electronic office, even though no one knew what that meant. We did, and everyone’s using it today. That makes it hard to remember what the world was like in 1972. Most people thought it was crazy to devote a whole computer to the needs of one person—after all, machines are fast and people are slow. But that’s true only if the person has to play on the machine’s terms. If the machine has to make things comfortable for the person, it’s the other way around. No machine, even today, can yet keep up with a person’s speech and vision.
I've been thinking about how we might integrate better machine intelligence into our thinking-writing tools, and one thesis I'm developing is that it's important that machines and humans can collaborate on the same document. Writing is how we think. If we want to think together with computers rather than using computers, we need to write together, not simply with the computer as a blunt tool for recording our own words.
Popular approaches often stick software-driven suggestions or connections in a sidebar or a context menu or squiggly red lines under our own text. But I really want my software to write alongside me, underneath my bullet points and in my margins, as if I'm editing and thinking together with a colleague. I want my eyes to slide seamlessly between my words and the machine's, and trust its voice.
I may sound pedantic, but I think there's a huge qualitative difference between a machine as a thought partner correcting my writing and being asked for help, versus the machine working with me and contributing proactively at a level equal to my own creative power.
I want to focus some slice of my research time on the question: how can we make collaborative authoring and thinking with computers more seamless?.