Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones. Maybe we have reached the end (for 50 years at least), but I think the safer bet is that the next big technology 30 years from now will be something that surprises us, not something we already have or could easily predict having wide adoption.
"Mainframes, minicomputers, desktop personal computers, laptops, and now tablets and smartphones" -- yes, so we had like 5 generations of computing hardware platforms. And we began with so premature and begging for improvement technologies (when they started in the 50s) and so large form factors that we had Moore's law going on for decades until a few years past.
Now we've reaching physical limits in CPU shrinking, and we have components so small (e.g. Apple Watch) than if they were any smaller you couldn't handle their buttons, or fit a camera lens, or speakers, or a large enough screen in there.
My point is, just because something has been going on for 5 generations of form factors, it's nowhere near enough evidence to be meaningful statistically or otherwise to deduce it will go on forever.
A turkey is fed every day by the farmer for months on end. But after 300+ observations that make it think feeding is never ending and inevitable there comes thanksgiving.
Voice-interfaced intelligent agents like Siri/Alexa/etc will continue to evolve.
Given a sufficiently advanced AI, buttons won't be needed for most computing tasks - any more than stirrups and a bridle were needed to drive the first automobiles.
They will connect to our brains.
> or fit a camera lens, or speakers, > or a large enough screen in there.
Not needed when they are connected to our brains.
Meanwhile, non invasive BCI are getting AWESOME...if you are a quadriplegic with no other options.
Now imagine we solve those problems, and the first BCI is on the market. It's safe, it's a little bit faster than typing/reading (hey, first generation right). Who is going to be the first early adopter to undergo massive brainsurgery? Turns out upgarding cochlear implants is so hard they are made to last 100 years (they get surrounded by bones and scar tissue...) so upgrading will be really hard. And who wouldn't want to have their blackberry implanted into their head right now...even worse, if we have proprietary technology in the first ones and now your brainberry can only talk to other brainberries...or we go full internet of shit and it needs a cloud server to do anything:)
You'll be needing an oxygenated brain for when they arrive.
Even though the amount of time spent using desktops and laptops in a desktop-like manner is decreasing, it's still a form factor found in every home. There may be more smartphones in that home but in my opinion, any product which is universally present in people's home is dominant even if it isn't being used as often as other options. Another example of this would be the microwave versus the oven. I'm not sure which one is used more often than the other but both are still dominant in terms of their universal presence in every home.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2244/2199183615_c2a8acbaff.jp...
Yes, you could buy a PC in the late 1970s. But they were still pretty rare, and even a freestanding home PC didn't become hugely common until the 1990s -- networking was the missing step.
Mainframes have had buffers put between them and end-users, but are still highly utilised today. And the computerisation of the office was proceeding at mixed rates through the 1980s and 1990s (though well advanced by the early 1990s).
Tablets are cool and you can carry them everywhere, but you can't really work important stuff on them since they are still too small.
On the other hand, even if laptops had very good battery life (which usually is not the case), they are still too big and heavy to carry around unless really needed (ie. for a meeting or something like that).
But an augmented reality laptop that lives in your phone is something people might want to use. Not for gaming, but for normal office work, be it programming or using spreadsheets.
And, at that point, regular users might think about obsoleting desktop PCs and laptops.
And to no small success - they worked out quantum mechanics and a lot of other very difficult problems on this platform.
People still even make games for this platform too.
I could say, "The manually driven, privately owned internal combustion car and truck have been dominant in transport for 100 years, so the safe bet is that they will continue to be." And that is definitely safe bet. But the interesting work will be done by people making the unsafe bets.
I could totally see a smartphone hooking up to another computer for gamers - like the Thunderbolt 3 chassis allowing you to use an external GPU. Or simply when you walk into your house your phone connects to a more powerful hub giving you sensor data and processing power?
Eventually I think we'll socially "shift" to allowing electronics within our bodies to augment our abilities. We can't fit everything into a smartphone and we can't keep shrinking it. We can make things more efficient but it's more likely we'll begin building onto humans. Bodies are bigger than phones.
I'm more excited than terrified about an implant attached to my optic nerve for true augmented reality. Imagine everyone having a photographic memory. I'd love to see more done to store data on crystal - or on DNA.
Let's get freaky. :-)
I'm pretty skeptical of the common "brain machine interface". It probably requires surgery, and for what ? to make people smarter in a world with AI ?
No, i think the main motivation for a brain machine interface should be experience/emotion oriented, And there's a big question if people will take surgery for it, or would they suffice with an external device ?
One such modality is fmri neurofeedback - using fmri analysis to give detailed and accurate feedback of what happens inside your brain, so you could achieve better control of it, and your internal world.
How much better control ? well, there's some early research about treating depression/anxiety, etc. but the more interesting research is about letting people train themselves to reach(very rapidly, unlike years/decades as a monk) a state very similar to the buddhist enlightenment, where you are content and free of ego. Another type of training session has taught people to increase empathy. And i'm sure you could do a lot more, since fmri is relatively accurate and fine-grained.
This line of research is early, and very expensive to do, but the technology is drastically improving[1], and with it will research.
And once you have that, once you could potentially become internally satisfied and happy, why would you risk that with a brain surgery , in order to have somewhat better virtual reality ?
[1]mri's are expensive, but marie lou-jespen is working on a $100 mri helmet
https://www.maryloujepsen.com/resume?_escaped_fragment_=#! "Goal: Replace the functionality of MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with a consumer electronics wearable using novel opto-electronics to achieve comparable resolution to MRI."
(Couldn't find anything else really; https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/05/oculus-exec-mary-lou-jep... "she will focus on "curing diseases with new display technology," by bringing MRI machines to every doctor' office in the world."; links a TEDxYouth talk but that doesn't talk about it.)
Unless you mean strong AI, which isn't anywhere close, I don't think this AI rush has much wider chances than the previous one, except for some narrow use cases.
I don't think so. I think AI is just one of those fads that come up every now and then, and then get abandoned for the next one.
I'm calling AI as in "actual working strong AI" or useful soft AI stuff as fad.
I'm calling "AI" as in the thing currently every VC/company is investing in and we see various helpers like Cortana and Siri based, the machine learning craze, on etc. Besides some obvious and fitting applications (like in self driving cars) it will go nowhere fast.
VR has already reached this stage, without making any large dent on the market in the first place even temporarily.
Note that this is the second time AI is promised and will get nowhere (the first was back in the 80s, with the "AI winter").
Still hoping to see some improvement but not holding my breath.
And there's nothing to Google.com more than a simple heuristic algorithm, which can be totally dumb to context and nuance.
(I've written my own, but I'm interested in others'.)
The thing is that touchscreen mobile phones are terribly clunky interfaces. It's much harder to express you intent with fat human fingers than with keyboard-and-mouse device. The advantage of the phone is entirely in its mobility, and the fact that you want a telephone anyway.
If some interface (augmented reality, voice, direct neural probes) becomes a workable UI that is both expressive and mobile, then it will take over.
Smart phones are awesome but by their very nature they have some limitations. The slowest aspect on any computer is communication from the user to the machine. We're slow and the constrained real estate of phones only makes it worse. I wouldn't consider typing all this on a phone. The next slowest is the other direction. So if you can figure out how to improve those channels in a highly portable way people will most likely buy it.
That brings us to the capability question. Voice kinda improves things when you can't use your hands but it's always been unreliable. Physical keyboards on phones are out of fashion. Smart watches are tiny and power constrained. Google glass looked neat but is expensive and again power constrained. It seems to be a serious question of how do you get a bigger device without the drawbacks of getting a bigger device.
Smartphones could be due for a substantial reduction in price (there's certainly demand for that). Not just hardware pricing, but also carrier pricing.
From a hardware perspective Apple must innovate (or have you believe they're innovating) to keep the product price and profit margins as high as possible. However, as the article points out, the smartphone market is mature. There's not much left to innovate in terms of the "hand held" form factor, other than price, or improving on already available features (better camera, better voice control, wireless charging etc).
The iPod provided good insight into "size", and even when given smaller sizes (like the nano), consumers generally preferred the standard, easier to hold sizes, with displays big enough to read. The Sony WM-10 cassette Walkman from 1983 was about the same size!
Size has been consistent for over 30 years.
It must be getting harder and harder for Apple to spin each revision as groundbreaking enough to pay the same price as last year. Android capitalizes on this. But it's still a pricing monopoly on both sides, which carriers enjoy as well.
When will there be a substantial reduction in price?
Does the capability exist yet?
Another place where the smartphone could help with costs: currently great noise cancelling earphones are very expensive($300) .And in general are well loved by those who can afford them.
but what happens if we remove most of the hardware(cheap) and compute($0 on phone) to the phone ? And create place in the app store for noise-cancelling apps ?
[1]http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/670-wireless-abundance-is-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusopoly
Acoustics make it impossible to do good noise cancellation using just an app. You really need a specialized microphone mounted directly on the headphones.
Of course the other part is that high-frequnecy noise is hard to cancel. But still Bose does a great job.
When smartphones become household items, visible innovation has turned into small tricks and gimmicks. People need smartphones for their daily activities and innovation that is directed towards low cost may be more profitable.
TV, computer monitors and smartphones seem all to be riding on screen technology. If there is development VR or AR technologies that make it into mass markets, it can disrupt all these markets.
if anything the smartphone will just become. become an everything. it will seamlessly interact with whatever device is nearby that you want to use and be the source point for your data and inquiries. get in your car, it takes over the center console. sit down at your desk and you work is right there like you left it. need to show a group something, point it at a display.
Yes: a) dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years these days, b) smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years. A lot of evolution happened, and "phones" 20 years from now will probably be nearly incomparable to phones today, just like your phone is just somewhat different from ENIAC.
ENIAC (which is 70 years old) had some obvious flaws: it was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. This has been true for computing hardware ever since. The first portable PC [1] is 35 years old. It was too big, too expensive, too hard to use, and didn't do enough. Ditto the first laptop, the first handhelds, the first smartphones, and pretty much every other first.
But that's no longer true for modern phones. Few complain their phones are too big, and many wanted larger ones, leading to the rise of the phablets. Phone prices could be lower, but they're cheaper than the phone service over the phone's life, so making them much cheaper won't make a big difference. They could still be a little easier to use, but ease of use isn't keeping anybody from buying one. And now they do pretty much everything; phones are the computing swiss army knife.
We may find a new direction to take things in, and there are some plausible candidates. But you can't use the history of computing platforms to predict future change in personal devices, because we've mostly solved the problems we set out to solve. As we've experienced with cars or buildings, we could easily be looking at decades of incremental change.
Citation needed. Although the addition of "these days" doesn't let us check any historical precedent, as makes the claim more like "it might have been different in the past, but from now on dominant consumer-facing platforms don't tend to last much longer than 10 years".
>smartphones only really took off exactly 10 years ago with the iPhone, so it's presumptuous to think we've hit the perfect sweet spot that will last us much longer.
That's irrelevant, since smartphones are just the continuation of computing platforms, so they herald back to ENIAC's time too. They are more portable computer in essence (that also takes calls -- which are now of course digitally communicated) than some novel technology.
>It's almost like arguing the ENIAC would be the pinnacle of computing for the next 50 years.
At the moment ENIAC has developed everybody knew it was early days, and tons of innovations unexploited for improvement. Heck, computing hadn't even hit the market much yet, it was all research work.
Today we already have exhausted Moore's law, and we're near physical limitations for further shrinking. It's as if people don't understand that innovations in platforms are S curved such that one see more improvement in a platform before it plateaus, before all the low hanging fruits have been implemented, and further research yields marginal returns for very expensive costs.
> Is it really unthinkable that smart phones that you carry around in your
pocket are the dominant platform for the next 50+ years?
Extrapolating to massive improvements in computing power per watt, and the main question is still: are augmented reality UIs and neural interfaces better at snapchat and poop emojis?
For consumers (not necessarily business use cases) you shouldn't have to pull your phone out every time you need direction, make a phone call, check your email, listen to a song etc...
Who said user friendliness is some inevitability?
Some tasks (if not all) have some inherent complexity.
Even if we had strong AI, we'd just delegate the tasks to it to handle -- we wouldn't reduce the complexity of handling them ourselves, we have just bypassed it.
https://medium.com/time-dorks/the-distraction-free-iphone-or...
Nobody knows the future, and maybe phones really are the end of the line for computing form factors, but I doubt it - there are too many problems with phones. Tiny, hard to read screens; poor battery life; fragile and easy to break, etc.
They certainly won't go away, because not even mainframes have completely disappeared, but they're already not the hot new thing, and the more time goes by the more people will be looking for shiny new devices.
I read these articles and everyone seems to be operating from the assumption that a fundamental platform shift is inevitable and coming within the next few years.
Is it really unthinkable that smart phones that you carry around in your pocket are the dominant platform for the next 50+ years?