Are we going to use the same desktop UX forever?

Scott Jenson's Akademy talk, Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?, has a good complaint: the desktop has no working memory. Copy a few too many things and the clipboard drops the old ones. He calls it the curse of direct manipulation. I haven't watched the talk. I'm going by LWN's write-up, so the details are secondhand.

"It hasn't changed in 20 years, so something must be wrong" doesn't convince me. Earlier attempts to replace it failed. Maybe keyboard, pointer and documents just fit. "It has always been like this" is a poor argument. "It has always been like this and people can use it" is better.

The effort belongs in AI. A chatbot glued onto old windows is the lazy version. If an agent does the work, the windows become a place to check what it did. What can a person see, and what can they undo?