Actually, on second glance the PDA one is really close, except for it being a docking desktop replacement.
^^^ THIS. This is why I don’t own a smart phone. I don’t want to run iOS. I want MacOS X on the damn thing. I want to be able to run Photoshop, FileMaker, crank up virtual machines that run Windows 10 and Windows 7 and MacOS 10.6.8, and compile code. I want to be able to render 3D landscapes. But yeah I want it to fit in my pocket (when undocked, of course) and be able to make phone calls and sent text messages.
Cell phones still seem to me to be like 8 track tapes. Some interim technology that’s going to be left in the dust. Any Moment Now.
Modern cell phone to me seem like something out of one of the wildest of science fiction fantasies, far more advanced than hardly anyone could have ever imagined.
Even as a whoosh this would be cliche at this point.
Where I live, cellphones are indispensable: not even a “thing” any more; an essential enabling technology for countless “things” that society now depends on.
OTOH if you mean they might be replaced by some different form factor with a superset of functionality (as tapes were)…yeah maybe.
Does the average person know what OS runs their DVR? Their car? An operating system is something that someone with an advanced computer will never know or worry about.
Look how much stuff that we had to worry about in the early days of PCs we don’t have to worry about anymore. The operating systems on phones pretty much - to the user - control what your screen looks like and what apps are available. Who issues a command to a phone OS?
What did science fiction get wrong about computers? They overestimated progress in AI, mostly because smart computers are easy to write about. But what they missed was how many computers there were going to be. With the Internet of Things pretty much everything you own is going to talk to everything else you own. Internet enabled refrigerators? Bah - we’re going to have internet enabled frozen food, which will talk to your microwave and tell it how much to cook it, as well as sensing doneness to stop in time. Just like my new dryer does with my clothes.
In a book on IoT I reviewed I saw that there is work on really smart houses. They’ll know when you get up and turn up the heat, heat your water so you don’t have to wait for your shower, turn on lights in your kitchen, and pop your newspaper on your screen. Think of servants in a big mansion. That’s more or less what we’ll all have.
As for AI, we won’t have intelligent machines in 20 years, but they’ll be intelligent enough to do what we want them to do and appear to understand us, as we give commands which use only a small subset of English.
Moore’s Law for silicon will have run out of steam long before 20 years from now. Quantum computers don’t seem to be hacking it. What we’ll really see is cheap nanometer silicon, which can get put into our IoT devices. For bigger processors we’ll use 2 1/2 D and 3D packing to compress things, and probably bigger chips and wafers, but not a lot denser. Disks will be dead, dead, dead of course.
PCs in the sense we use them today will be something we use at work, or at home if you are a hobbyist, but most people will use tablets or smartphones which can easily cast to any display which happens to be around, and probably roll up displays.
I don’t think we’ll be doing significant control with our minds in 20 years. It would take too much training.
We’ll think about the internet like we think about the electrical grid today - only when something goes wrong. If stores can figure out what you are looking for and sell it to you - maybe as you pass for simple things, direct you to it for things you want to touch and try on form more complicated things - they will be happy to pay for service everywhere. You can get free internet as long as you agree to get their advertising. Which will be smarter than today.
Why?
Why do we need this? Sure, some of the described functionality is cool, but honestly, who’s going to pay for all the required upgrades? People use 20, 30, 40 year old kitchen appliances. They live in old buildings. They drive old vehicles. Not everyone is cutting edge or wants to be, and not everyone sees an advantage to hooking every damn thing in the house up to the internet.
Again - who is going to pay for all these upgrades?
My microwave doesn’t have an internet connection but it works fine - why should I replace it? My refrigerator doesn’t have an internet connection, but it works fine - why should I replace it? And so on and so forth. This isn’t just getting a new phone, this is entirely re-working most homes and, again, who is going to pay for that? Frankly, I’d rather pay for the apartment building I’m living in to upgrade its insulation that get a whole new set of kitchen appliances when the current kitchen works fine even for someone like me who does most of their own cooking and baking but the insulation is not up to modern standards (although they did re-do all the windows a few years back which I’m told made a definite difference in utility bills). I guarantee you that not one person in this building can afford to toss all their current things to replace them with the “Internet of Things”.
Sure, there are some people who want everything in their lives to be cutting edge, but the reality is that most people possessions are in a range of ages from “bought yesterday” to decades old.
What people are going to do is, when something finally wears out or is broken beyond (what they consider reasonable) repair THEN they’re going to buy something new… but even then, non-internet-connected appliances will still have an appeal, or be cheaper, and will continue to exist for quite a while if not indefinitely.
Which is why I don’t get these assumptions that in the World of Tomorrow we’ll all be living in homes that are completely automated. Retrofitting existing housing stock is going to be cost-prohibitive for many, and many others just don’t see a need for the refrigerator to communicate.
Why replace it? Because everything eventually wears out, and it’s doubtful if you can replace it with an exact duplicate.
Not long ago I went shopping for a new car. I just wanted the basic auto, called a “preacher car” in the trade. But the cheapest models all had electric windows, power everything, elaborate (to me) trim, fancy interiors, etc. If I wanted a new car at all, I had to pay for all this.
I recently bought a water detector for my basement, so if I had a bad leak, I would be notified in a timely fashion. The detector has to be set up by the user, but there is no setup on the device; you are required to use a smartphone. Not a computer, not a tablet, only a smartphone. Although theoretically it could be set up many ways, there was only one in the design, which you are forced to use. Obviously the designer assumed that every home is equipped with a smartphone as a basic appliance.
It’s possible that when you replace your refrigerator, as you inevitably will, that the only models available are internet-connected whether you like it or not. If you don’t have internet at home, it may not work at all. Such is progress.
You know, if this were describing some sort of governmental program people might shout “Fascism!” and protest in the streets.
This is why I laugh at the anti-government whackos who feel oppressed by “the man”. I’m pretty tech savvy, but I feel WAY more oppressed by industry forcing this kind of nonsense on us without much choice on our part. But I suppose one could argue that without demand for it, it wouldn’t be happening.
Here’s what I’m hoping for going forward, but not necessarily predicting:
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A “unified theory of personal computing”: A phone-sized actual computer that can run any operating system with complete backwards compatibility. I’m sick of my perfectly good software being “improved” out of existence by upgrades. Yeah, yeah, copyright laws… but I can dream, can’t I?
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More portable peripherals. I love the idea of an augmented reality keyboard and monitor. No clunky laptop to lug around.
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Getting rid of touch screen interfaces in moving vehicles. I think this was done foolishly, and I say this as a guy who flies a cutting edge airplane for a living. Those interfaces are really not good when you are operating a vehicle. Bring back buttons and knobs for some functions.
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Another pipe dream would be actual testing of software such that frequent updates aren’t necessary. I’m astonished at how frequently stuff just doesn’t work right. iPhones have huge lists of glitches. Hell, even airplanes are now falling out of the sky because of shoddy software. Let’s start doing some better quality control. Yeah, I know, another pipe dream…
The funny thing about some of these futuristic predictions from my perspective is that if an observer could have looked through some magical time-shifting telescope at the time the OP was written to see the marvels of how I would be doing computing 16 years into the future, they would be amazed. Mainly, they would be amazed to see that I was using the exact same computer and the exact same OS, Windows XP. Why not? There was no real reason to change, and no truly significant advances that would materially change the way I work. Sometimes you just need to get a job done.
That changed only less than a year ago, and only because the power supply blew up on a computer so obsolete that no compatible PSU was available. In truth, there were also some security issues due to expired root certificates and the sheer complexity of many modern websites was slowing it down, but those aren’t truly fundamental problems. The new computer is very much faster than the old one with 16 times the RAM, but it does essentially the exact same things in the exact same ways. I suppose the point here is that it’s easy to get carried away with technological prognostication, especially when technology reaches a sort of plateau of functionality where it already does everything you need.
This is not to say that computers will not be very much different in the future – I’m certain that they will – but you may have to look much farther ahead than you might think. It’s a similar paradigm to the evolution of artificial intelligence, which is indisputably far more advanced today than it was 20 or 30 years ago, but it hasn’t made that quantum leap to something qualitatively different.
You do know there’s a market for used but still functional appliances?
Yeah, a few years ago at work we had a problem where some genius in HR decided the company health benefits would only be accessible by smartphone app. Whoops - not everyone has a smartphone, but the company lawyers said EVERYONE has to have access to their benefits… so either buy everyone a smartphone or make it accessible in multiple ways.
That ranks right along with the IT genius who thought the middle of a Sunday afternoon was a great time to shut down all the cash registers for a software upgrade. Simultaneously. On a Sunday afternoon in a grocery store? HELLO? Do you have any understanding of the industry in which you work? That was a fun two hours! Never happened again for some reason…
My point being that companies that do that sort of thing as a policy (rather than as an exception to be corrected) tend to limit themselves in ways that cut into a customer base and may result in them no longer existing in the near future.
Such is stupid.
Requiring basic appliances like stoves and refrigerators to require a working internet is stupid. It’s an unnecessary complication. It’s like requiring your shoes to be connected to the internet. It’s a function completely unrelated to the purpose for which you purchase the appliance. It’s like on Star Trek where barbells for weight lifting/exercise have touchscreens. Why?
'Course, what do I know? My sewing machine is 110 years old and still runs on muscle power instead of electricity - I’m told I’ll replace it eventually but I dunno, I’m beginning to suspect it may outlast me in the end.
Even with electronics - when my flatscreen TV stopped working everyone told me to just junk it and buy a new one. Instead, I figured out how to do a factory-reset and got it working again - I suspect some of the “inevitability” is overstated. As another example: when I went to get my first smartphone about two months ago the place I went was also selling brand-new flip phones and handsets for landlines. So I guess there’s still a market for those and people still willing to service that market. Sort of like how I can still get a new drive belt for my 110 year old sewing machine. If anything, it’s easier than ever before because now I get one on the internet at places like Amazon and eBay…
I predict in the future computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and only the 10 richest kings will be able to afford them.
Apparently this thread is 17 years old but I’ll answer it like its a new subject.
These are my amateur guesses.
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Probably not. I’m guessing verbal interfaces and AI will be much better. There won’t be nearly as much need to sit and type because the AI will be able to do a lot of the work for you, and you will interact with it verbally.
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I’m guessing quantum computers, optical computers, carbon nanotube computers, DNA computers, etc. will all be mainstream and affordable.
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No. Machines will keep surpassing us at more and more tasks.
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Yeah, probably. I’m not sure when or how much info is needed to do that. Is mind reading really necessary when you can just talk or type though?
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Probably a big one, seeing how it is just computers tied together. That’ll still be very important.
I’m skeptical of verbal control replacing keyboards. Imagine navigating a spreadsheet verbally. Imagine a bunch of office workers in cubicles all talking to their computers at once.
Imagine a bunch of commuters on a train or bus all talking to their cellphones at once. Imagine the loss of privacy.
Why is verbal control necessarily superior to tactile/visual control? It depends on the application.
My assumption is it’ll be more like talking to an intelligent assistant.
Like instead of clicking and typing out every single step in excel, you just say ‘arrange this data in an easy to understand format’ and it rearranges your excel data for you because it understands what you mean, what data you value, what you consider to be an easy to understand format, etc. Things like that.
I don’t mean that you’ll have to speak out every single step like you do now when you type. It’ll be more like asking an assistant to do something for you, then it’ll do it and give you the results.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing - just that it’s going to happen. We old people are not going to upgrade. But my daughter - who isn’t all that young - and her husband have wired up their house to play music by voice command. No retrofitting required. I’m not going to be buying smart lightbulbs any time soon, but some people will.
And since the functionality is going to be integrated on a chip, it will be cheap. Ever buy a talking greeting card? That chip would have cost a ton 30 years ago, but now it is practically free. My smart dryer was no more expensive than my old dumb one. Microwave ovens are already digital - I’ve seen the control board on mine - so that won’t cost anything more. There will probably be a chip in the packaging of the food for inventory already, so it wouldn’t take much to code in a line or two of cooking instructions.
Who needs all the stuff in cars today? But we have it. You don’t have to use the new functions, but they’ll be there.
There was a Dilbert where Wally was showing off his voice interface to Dilbert. Dilbert said “Delete .”
I can type faster than I can talk, and it lets me proofread and correct at the same time. I sometimes use voice with Google on my phone, but even with a relatively crappy keyboard typing (with word completion) is usually faster.
I’m guessing that none of them will ever be either one.
My general bet would be something like the old Star Trek; you say the word “computer” and pause and it answers you and does what you ask. And it really isn’t seen; just there. If you ask for display (such as say limitless porn) it will transmit said data to whatever screen you happen to be near.
And it will probably happen sooner than 20 years.