Make space for the PC in the museum

Three days of wonderful inspirational stuff at the Flash on the Beach conference has regrettably come to an end. As an aside, I got a beach towel and beach thongs, or flip-flops for the South African readers, in my free handout kit. It’s all of something like 14 degrees during the day and four degrees at night in Brighton — hardly beach weather. In the 12 months I’ve lived in Brighton, I have yet to stick my toe into the surf … what surf? And here I am, coming from Cape Town!

But I digress. One of the talks that I went to was by Richard Leggett. His talk was on Touching the Future, which looked at human-computer interaction and the web in 2012. This talk kind of fitted in with my speculations on whether the PC had run its course. I had spoken about this in a previous article. Much to my surprise it had caused quite a fair amount of discussion and speculation. So I looked forward to this presentation to give me more ammunition with respect to my own guesswork on the demise of the PC.

One of the first points Richard made — and apologies if I don’t get the order right, as it’s so dark in the conference venues one can’t make notes — is that we will all be online all the time. That is actually a huge concept on its own. Of course one must remember we are talking Europe and the developed world here. The developing world is lucky if it can dial up to the internet.

Not only will people be accessing the net permanently, but they will also be on the net with any gadget that they can grab at that moment in time. There will be a growth in surface-based computing. This could be a panel on the wall in the lounge or your coffee table, as Microsoft has shown in demos. With other words, touch surfaces will become more popular. Makes sense to me.

There will be greater development in intelligent software that will allow people to use the internet more intelligently. That means that the search software will be able to attempt some kind of logical interpretation of the search requests. He gave the example of a task somebody might want to complete that would query what language the next economic superpower of the world would speak.

This would mean that the search engine would be able to evaluate what criteria would need to be met in order to determine what would be considered an economic superpower. Once the criteria had been identified, then only would the search engine be able to propose possible economic superpowers of the future. For most of us it seems obvious that the language in question would be Mandarin!

Richard Leggett also felt that there would need to be a much more logical and central way of filing one’s digital possessions. This would mean establishing libraries for DVDs, music, e-books, photos and so forth with retrieval and preview systems. He demonstrated an available software application, Delicious Library, which had some fascinating features already, even though only at v1.6.6 of its development.

Talking about libraries, a great way of lending out an e-book, for instance, would mirror the existing hard copy where one quite willingly lends a book to a friend and receives it — one hopes — back again in one piece. One would be able to lend out the e-book and the intellectual property attached to that book. As this e-book would continue to be recorded in our library, we would know who had it at any one time and would be able to terminate this right when we wanted the e-book back — a much safer way to lend something to somebody. Once having taken the right to the IP back, your friend wouldn’t be able to open the file again. How clean is that.

A further development that Richard saw, making the point by presented a demo using a live subject much to the amusement of the audience, was the ability of the new gadgets to scan a user’s face or iris and in this way identifying the person. The facial ID would tie in with all the other personal details already accumulated on the web and available to whoever was looking for it.

As an example, the video camera on the gadget — in this case a PC, but it could quite easily be a cellphone — would scan the face on to the machine/gadget. And if one was visiting Amazon for instance, Amazon would be able to take the image and search through the internet information available on you, such as your Facebook friends and what they were interested in and what books or movies you had discussed with them on Facebook. Amazon would then present these options to you for possible purchase decisions.

One of the important points made during this presentation was the fact that the human computing user would be using many gadgets and that the gadget would fit the circumstances of the user’s needs. But what seemed fairly obvious was that for the private user the standard PC would probably not be at the top of the list. Hand-held devices and touch-screen technology would feature strongly in the future.

At present, computing power is being developed to fit on to smaller and smaller chips, in this way allowing tiny but powerful devices to come on to the market. To augment this, the innovation in the field of computing is now in the software arena with small teams of developers producing the next level of intelligent applications — software that has the ability to reason.

Science fiction, anybody? And just like science fiction, let your imagination run freely for a moment and imagine how wonderful it will be to have little held-hand gadgets with which to point at, click or manipulate text, photos or video. Or you can swipe across a glass surface to get your task done. Isn’t it time the Qwerty keyboard got ditched and we could move files around without having to use a mouse or trackpad? And trash that 15- or 17-inch monitor — what’s wrong with using that 63-inch plasma TV screen? We ain’t seen nothing yet.

On the other hand, for those of you out there who are clinging on to your laptops and desktop PCs for dear life, you will be happy to hear that at least 90% of the computer nerds attending the conference were never far away from their Apple MacBook Pros, the forest of lit-up Apple logos a dead giveaway in the dark auditoriums!