Computers love numbers. Actually, they hate everything except numbers. But humans are good with electrical signals (smell, taste and touch), electromagnetic waves (sight), and mechanical waves (sound). So in order for computers to communicate with humans, there needs to be an interpreter that interfaces between these two representations.
It is not a coincidence that majority of resources have gone into inventing better technology involves:
- build better computers
- build better interfaces
People use human language to communicate, but computers give us this piece of plastic board with a bunch of buttons for you to press. It seems like you have to compress your intentions into a finite input space to transmit signals. So that means “building better interfaces” can be defined as reducing the compression work from humans and moving it toward computers.