The future of technology means making the computer disappear
GigaOM’s recent RoadMap conference in San Francisco featured a number of thought-provoking speakers on the topic of the future of technology, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, venture investor Mike Moritz and former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. While many views were expressed, one thread that ran through many of the different presentations, from mobile and design to health and communication, was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer invisible to the user, even as it becomes more powerful.
I took a look at this idea in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Dorsey, for example, said that the power of an information network like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the technology behind it. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the service is now processing more than 250 million tweets a day. Dorsey said that for him, the most powerful aspect of the service is how it can help connect us to others in far-flung parts of the world, as it did earlier this year during the demonstrations in Iran.
The Twitter co-founder said that he has also tried to make the technology in his other company — mobile payments–processing startup Square — as invisible as possible, so that retailers and other entrepreneurs can use it easily to expand their businesses and make them more efficient. Said Dorsey:
Both [Twitter and Square] are great at encouraging more face-to-face human interactions . . . I believe strongly that this information and these tools help us be better, but we need to be sure, as builders of tools, that it’s not overwhelming, that it’s meaningful, and that it’s not distracting. That it’s not something that puts technology first; it puts humans first.
Meanwhile, Mark Rolston of frog design (which famously helped design the original Macintosh) talked about how computers and other advanced technology are already beginning to disappear into our surroundings and devices, and that he expects this to accelerate in the future. Rolston said that it doesn’t take much to think about combining voice technology, like the kind Apple has in Siri, with the kind of processing power we have now to create a computer that uses any available surface (a wall, a mirror, etc.) as a screen.
Rolston imagines an extension of the kind of physical interface that Microsoft’s Kinect uses, where gestures and even facial recognition could be used to control all kinds of processes or devices and where computing power behind the scenes would allow us to interact with our homes in different ways. Computers would become “externalized resources in a room.” In that kind of environment, Rolston said, “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them.”
This concept of hiding the computer can be seen emerging in other areas, too, including health-related devices like the UP from Jawbone. Many of them appear to be just fancy jewelry — in the UP’s case, a somewhat geeky-looking bracelet — but they contain as much computing power as a desktop computer probably did a decade ago. The UP tracks your activity and records your steps, just like some other devices do, but it can also be programmed to alert you when you have been inactive for a while, and it watches your sleep patterns so it can wake you at the right point in your sleep cycle. So it has a tremendous amount of sophisticated software inside it, but it looks extremely simple — all the complex parts are hidden.
As this phenomenon accelerates, companies of all kinds are going to have to adapt to this ubiquitous computing environment, both by making their products as noncomputer-like as possible (something Apple has always excelled at) and by taking advantage of the intelligence and connectivity being built into even the smallest objects around us. For more details on what is required in order to do that, please read the full article at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Angry Julie Monday
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Mathew, this is good stuff.
I wrote this about a year ago: The Impact of Disappearing Design in Computing. http://billbar.posterous.com/the-impact-of-disappearing-design-in-computin
Thanks, Bill.
If we get rid of visible computers, we will limit written text as the “main” interaction between machine and human. Which might have a profound impact from search to … twitter, since the persistence of written messages might change. To really facilitate this, systems have to “act” differently not only from a UI perspective.
Elaborate, Ronald if you can please.
Oh boy, how to elaborate without writing a lecture about smart machines.
Let’s try from a context angle(past,present,prediction):
For search:
In normal interaction h2c(human to cognitive aware) we use not only spoken/written language, a large part is “body” language and situation awareness. This sets context, which creates meaning. (text) Search guesses intent and delivers “options” for this assumption without having context. Since it is imprecise it requires persistence of the written word to enable selection from a list, or it becomes really annoying really fast. Siri without [cutesy] answers just as a search inquiring interface which makes one look at text all the time in an SEO world, useless.
To twitter:
Listen to a twitter stream without the benefit of context, I would consider that torture(white noise at a certain level).
In other words we will need self/context aware machines to augment the data we provide (spoken, gestures ….) to enable meaning.
Do I need more coffee?
these kind of people are always wrong, without exception. The future of technology is to higly shrink due to ressource constraints and current global peak of oil production in particular
Its more about filling the Sensory Cloud chock full of data for parsing from your body and activities, rather than just the stuff you manually feed into your computer.
Yes, I agree Tim — which is why devices like the UP and the BodyBugg and FitBit are so interesting. Thanks for the comment.
This article title is a duh statement and really doesnt address where tech needs to go to make system ubiquity such that it is invisible to the user.
Not only that, it also doesnt talk about the magnitude of the paradigm shift in interface input and interaction required, (think Star Trek and beyond.) When you can turn a new interface into an intuitive finger and voice process that isnt limited at all by the form factor, then you will see the tech fade into the background and not before!
I’d be nice to mention Mark Weiser, who coined the ubiquitous computing term in 1988 and was the ubicomp thought leader. People have been talking about it for ages.
What’s new is the plummeting cost of electronics and sensors, which make embedding them into everyday devices a no-brainer. This is still dumb hardware though looking for intelligent uses which is where we are now.
It’s incredible how far we’re going with computers and technology in general. What an exciting age to live in!
Since when did the term “face to face interaction” come to signify digital communication? technology like Twitter is surely helping us to communicate with people all over the world, but it has also had the unpleasant side effect of divprcing us from the world at hand (I.e. it has de-valued the power of *actual* face to face interaction. You know, the kind of old-fashioned communication where two people sit down and actually talk face to face? A machine cannot replace all the minute signals that get sent and received in person. Until it can, it might behove us to avoid calling twitter a form of “face to face interaction” and call it what it really is: mass commercilization of dis-embodied, depersonalized witticisms.