The original note, as written at the time
An AI tool that, by simulating all common computing instances, lets and guides a user through anything they would like to learn. It is like an operating system but mounted over your mother operating system and every web based resource you require.
Ongoing development
An AI tool that, by simulating all common computing instances, guides a user through anything they would like to learn. Like an operating system, but mounted over your mother operating system and over every web resource you require.
The phrase that matters is mounted over. Not a replacement for the system, not a new environment you must move into, but a layer that sits on top of what is already there and interprets it.
That is a very different proposition from an app, and much more useful. An app asks you to bring the task to it. A mounted layer comes to the task, wherever the task is happening — inside a spreadsheet, inside a booking site, inside a form that a ministry built in 2011 and nobody understands.
And simulating the instances is the clever part. Rather than teaching a person to use software, the layer can hold a working copy of the software, do the thing in the copy, show the result, and then do it for real when the person is ready. You learn by watching the thing being done in a place where nothing can break.
That turns learning from instruction into demonstration. Most adult learning fails not because the material is hard but because the penalty for a mistake is immediate and real — you file the return wrong, you send the wrong document, you book the wrong date. A simulation removes the penalty and the guidance sits beside you.
I would build it for the boring things first. Not coding, not design. Tax. Registration. The hospital referral. The scholarship application. The things where a person with a phone and no confidence currently gives up, and where the state has decided that a PDF is a curriculum.
And it should be local, on the device, so it works in a room with no signal, because the room with no signal is where the person who needs it most is standing.
This one has caught up faster than anything else here. Assistants now sit over the system rather than inside it, and the phrase “mounted over” has become a product category. The simulation half is still missing, though. The tools can do the task and they can explain the task, but almost none of them will let you watch it be done somewhere it cannot hurt you first, which was the whole point of the copy — a place where nothing you do is real until you are ready.