The Future of Personal Computing

Photo by expertinfantry

The future of personal computing will be distributed and ubiquitous. Personal computers will no longer sit on our desks or even our laps; they have already set up temporary camp in our pockets, but pretty soon, even that prime location will probably fall out of favor.

Perhaps it is more wishful thinking than futurology, but I’m certain, in a none too distant future, we will ditch the hardware in favor of the personal profile and storage in the cloud; a virtual PC if you will; OS and all.

I believe we will soon carry some sort of RFID microdot which will contain a unique dynamic signature and IP address capable of interfacing with sensors embedded ubiquitously in the urban infrastructure, allowing for the creation of temporary, ad hoc, near field networks.

These near field networks will allow us to connect with our virtual cloud PCs, virtually anywhere and anytime.

Another key piece of the puzzle will be the way we interact with our “personal clouds”. The traditional, desktop metaphor of the GUI will, to a great extent, go the way of the Dodo. We will interact with our cyber assistants by looking, talking, thinking and moving. Or, to put it another way, the world around us will become our GUI. An ever adapting augmented reality HUD of sorts.

Just as sensors are embedded in the urban infrastructure, they will also be embedded on our persons. Temperature, location, pulse, ambient light, and other sensors will be in our contact lenses, our clothes, under our skins; a true Internet of Things, where, sooner than we expect, every object will have some kind of online presence which will allow us to interact with it in multiple ways.

Artificial Intelligence will interpret the vibration of our vocal cords, the dilation of our pupils and the way our body reacts to the sounds around us. All of which will be cross referenced with our location, the local time, our personal preferences and daily routines in order to do our bidding and even preempt us.

Hardware will still play a role; augmented reality will truly come into its own.

What will change:

– no constant upgrade life cycle to worry about
– battery life will no longer be a source of bottlenecks
– data centers will become increasingly important
– the environmental footprint of the PC will be drastically reduced
– data centers, in turn, will become greener as technology moves forward
– programmers will take on an ever more central role
– we will continue to depend on personal hardware to a certain extent

What we’ll use it for:

The answer is both obviously straightforward (everything) and world-changing.

The Personal computing revolution began a while ago; the computing, processing and communication power, that was once the exclusive purview of the likes of NASA, IBM or Ford, has leapfrogged beyond wildest imagination and into our pockets. We have all heard some form of the formula “the smart phone in your hand has X times more computing power than NASA did when it put a man on the Moon.”

This cheap and accessible tool has allowed us to compete with the business and industry giants of our time on an increasingly even footing. And right now manufacturing and global distribution, the last bastions of the Big Business establishment, are slowly but steadily being eroded. Through a combination of “gun for hire” manufacturing plants in places like China and Vietnam, just in time production models like Lulu.com and off the shelf parts, one man operations are making everything from crowdsourced street legal cars to backyard spacecraft. Today examples of homemade airplanes and helicopters, stratospheric photography and xxxx abound.