Where are we Going with Personal Technology?
by Gerald Trites

Many pundits have been predicting the demise of the personal computer for several years, even though the technology is only about 25 years old. Lets face it, PCs are the first major technological change after the age of print, and contain many relics of that age. The keyboard, for example, is a clear holdover from typewriters, which were the primary means of recording information for many decades before the age of technology. The documents you find in computers, from pdf to word and anything else, are clear relics of the age when we had to print large documents to convey information and ideas. When people had to read those documents to stay informed. Who reads large documents any more?

No, what we really want is a computer we can talk to - just like the Star Trek folks did. We want to request information orally and receive instant answers in the form we want, whether that be voice, video or whatever. We want to be able to dialogue with our computers. That's the way people learned for centuries - dialoguing with those who know something they want to know, from elders to Plato to court tutors. It's the natural way to learn, obtain information and develop knowledge. That's what we want from our computers. We don't want to carry around big laptops. Something like a cell phone size or smaller would be much more suitable. No keyboard. No screen. Of course, we may want to be able to see things like videos and movies and so on. But the technology is there for projection screens that can be created on any surface or even in the air. We don't really want to have to carry around a screen. Much of the physical bulk of laptops comes from the screens and keyboards and the batteries required to drive those big screens and hard drives. Of course, by the way, hard drives are destined for the dustheap, to be replaced by the internet.

Does this mean that technology will become obsolete? Of course not. In fact, technology will become even more pervasive and extensive. We see it being buried in all kinds of things we use every day. Cars are perhaps the best example, as per this article: "This Car Runs on Code", By Robert N. Charette. Most of us really don't want to be dealing with technology to carry out our daily lives. We want it in the background, so we don't even need to think about it. Ultimately, PCs will be found only in the hands of the hobbyists and committed geeks - like myself.