The Computers Are Disappearing.
But not in the way you might think. And as they do, it will mean they're helping us live more interesting and possibly easier, lives.
They’re these windows into another world. Some are tiny, a watch face, mobiles. Then there’s the massive in-your-face sphere in Las Vegas. Screens represent the interface into the another dimension, one that contests our realities every day.
They are obvious. They are driven by computers, quietly humming machines dreamed up in our imaginations. As all technologies are a realization of human imagination. Sometimes, the best technologies we create are the ones that are boring or eventually, become invisible.
Many computers today have become invisible to us. When you bark at Alexa, Siri or Google, how often do you ponder the massive, energy hungry beasts squatting in football length buildings in some remote part of the world?
Screens remain the biggest, most pervasive way we interact with the digital sphere, with cyberspace. The input technologies and tools being keyboards, a mouse, a little bit of voice. We’ve tried making these sensors where we wave our hands and squiggle and pinch our fingers, but no one really seems to like that approach very much. These are called User Interfaces (UI.)
There are a lot of very smart people who fuss over UIs from software engineers to designers. Whole teams of people who agonize for hours and spend countless minutes on Slack channels debating button size, position and colour. It’s quite a thing.
Perhaps someday though, many of the screens will fade away, become a sort of background. No, we won’t all be wearing fancy headsets and bumping into each other in the office or on the street. We certainly won’t be hanging all day out in the metaverse, a dream as silly as the idea of a perfect utopia. An example of this is the Humane AI Pin.
Once we figure out how to help Artificial Intelligence tools like Generative AI, to stop hallucinating, this might actually become more helpful. Because today, most information technologies aren’t that helpful. It’s why we have a productivity paradox.
If we step back a little and observe, we might see that our current phase of information technologies, the many UIs we use to interact with them, so many screens, may in fact just be a transitional phase.
That what we are truly working towards, is a way to interact with and get more out of, our digital sphere is with less intrusive technologies.
Take cars for example. Auto makers today are in a deep thrall with screens. They are replacing physical buttons with screens everywhere. Humans, however, don’t like them. Perhaps in the future, we will see a return to analog knobs and fiddly things. But behind them will be sophisticated technologies that add value and meaning and do things for us.
Humans love to add things to technology things that don’t need anything added to them. Appliance manufacturers added things to washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, that make them more complicated, harder to repair and don’t really do much.
Regardless of how many screens and buttons one adds to a fridge, all we really care about is that the door opens and closes and keeps our food cold. That a dryer dries our clothes. An LED screen on a washing machine is just another thing to learn that doesn’t do much of anything new.
The real magic may been when we can take all these extra things and have them packed nicely into a box that merrily hums away in the background and knows what things to do because we told it to do a thing by speaking to it. Once.
No more fiddling with apps, downloading them, digging around in the kitchen drawer for the WiFi password written on a pink sticky note. Or trying to figure out which Internet-of-Things standard is being used. Endless fiddling with APIs to connect this and that thing to other things that do things we do understand anything about.
Already, many computers, perhaps the majority, live in the background hum of our lives. Data centres, routers, modems. The subterranean entanglement that remains the domain of digital wizards.
What is ahead of us is ways to interact with things that can do almost anything we want it to in less obtrusive ways. Maybe with a few buttons, some spoken sentences and words. Knobs, dials and sliders that seemingly appear out of nowhere on a small interactive screen that understands context very well. Such as time of day, season, humidity, adult or child.
The more engineers, coders, designers and such build more software, the more we use AI tools to do the basics, the better these things will become. We will evolve more standards. Much of what today is seen as special or hard to do as a thing or a feature, will be table stakes.
While there’s no claim here to building a utopia of digital things, we will be able to do more things with less fuss and muss. The computers will, to most of us, disappear in the aether of our connected world.
These are the forces of human culture at work. They take a long time, at least to us, but not in the sense of time overall, to evolve. Humans evolve technologies as a part of our biological evolution, a symbiotic relationship that’s been effervescing for millions of years.
We might always remember that all technologies come from our imagination. And we’re very clever at using our imaginations to do ever more clever things with technology. That’s very good, because if didn’t imagine technology we probably wouldn’t exist as a species.