Advait Sarkar
Affiliated Lecturer at University of Cambridge
Advait is an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, honorary lecturer at University College London, and researcher at Microsoft. He studies how to design human interfaces for artificial intelligence, and how to help people program and interact with data.
Events
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talk Everyone
Why Would Anyone Visit a Website? Reflections on the Generative Shift in Human-Computer Experience
Main Hall, Tuesday 18 November 17:15 - 18:15
The web is entering a transformative era shaped by artificial intelligence, redefining both how we build and how we experience it. AI is altering the cognitive landscape of knowledge work, affecting users' critical thinking, memory, creativity, and metacognition. In programming, we now have “vibe coding,” where the boundaries between prototyping and production blur, as do traditional roles such as designer, engineer, and product manager. This fluidity may enable teams to collaborate across expertise like never before. At the same time, we are designing not only for humans but for AI agents: autonomous intermediaries that can bypass many traditional UX constraints. This raises a serious question: If agents can dynamically adapt interfaces and solve interaction problems on the fly, why would anyone visit a website or use an app directly? The answer lies in vision. Future web services must deliver experiences that cannot be intermediated; core experiential primitives that take inspiration from games, music, or film. In this keynote, I argue that the defining skill for the next generation of web creators is not technical execution but artistic foresight: the ability to imagine what users cannot yet conceive.