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Is The World Shifting To 'Ambient Computing'? (computerworld.com)
In the future, "A massive convergence of technologies will enable us to use computers and the internet without really using them," argues Computerworld.
At the dawn of the personal computing revolution, people "operated" a computer. They sat down and did computing -- often programming. Later, with the application explosion, operators became "users." People used computers for purposes other than programming or operating a computer -- like balancing their checkbooks or playing video games. All computing uses so far have required a cognitive shift from doing something in the real world to operating or using a computer. Ambient computing changes all that, because it involves using a computer without consciously or deliberately or explicitly "using" a computer....
It's just there, guiding and nudging you along as you accomplish things in life. Ambient computing devices will operate invisibly in the background. They'll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits. So a good working definition of ambient computing is "computing that happens in the background without the active participation of the user...."
In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient -- all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life. Between now and then we'll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.
Though the article identifies smart speakers are the first ambient computing devices most people will encounter, it's argues that that's just the beginning of a much larger change.
"We're also going to be flooded and overwhelmed by the 'ambient computing' hype as, I predict, it will become one of the most overused and abused marketing buzzwords ever."
It's just there, guiding and nudging you along as you accomplish things in life. Ambient computing devices will operate invisibly in the background. They'll identify, monitor and listen to us and respond to our perceived needs and habits. So a good working definition of ambient computing is "computing that happens in the background without the active participation of the user...."
In 20 years, the idea of picking up a device or sitting down at a computer to actively use it will seem quaintly antiquated. All computing will be ambient -- all around us all the time, whispering in our ear, augmenting the real world through our prescription eyeglasses and car windshields, perceiving our emotions and desires and taking action in the background to help us reach our business goals and live a better life. Between now and then we'll all ride together on a very interesting journey from computers we actively use to computing resources increasingly acting in the background for us.
Though the article identifies smart speakers are the first ambient computing devices most people will encounter, it's argues that that's just the beginning of a much larger change.
"We're also going to be flooded and overwhelmed by the 'ambient computing' hype as, I predict, it will become one of the most overused and abused marketing buzzwords ever."
Yeah, just like tablets have replaced the PC. Call me skeptical
Writing a paper or a book, graphing/crunching data, editing images, etc, on an Amazon Echo or other smart speaker. Often, you really do need a screen and maybe even a keyboard.
Computers already exist in most everything, people just don't think of MCUs as computers but they have everything needed for computing. Cars, monitors, anything that's bluetooth, old 90s cell phones, your fitbit, anything that is USB, traffic signal controllers, digital cameras and just about everything that needs electricity have computers in them. Your credit cards are even computers. You can say that's a low bar but they all computer fast enough to leave the old mainframes in the dust.
Just because your computer has "one job" doesn't make it less of a computer, it just means you are unaware that you are surrounded by computers and what you think of as a computer is a macrocomputer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Ambient computing" was first envisioned by George Orwell back in 1949.
It's bullshit. It's a throwback to the days when computers where run by men in white coats and you had no business even getting close to a computer. It's all about disempowering the user, and centralize power to the high and mighty.
It means you will use your computer for what the powers that be have foreseen and authorized as legitimate uses, and nothing else, which is ass-backwards to what the PC was all about, empowering users and use it to augment their own, personal skills by offloading the tedium to the machine and concentrate on the important stuff, without having to ask permission from the high priests first.
This isn't about convenience, it's about power, surreptitious surveillance and control.
With 64 connected neurons, it's not going to be a high rate of speed. Neurons have a refractory period of about 1-4 ms between each firing, so it'll be more like dial-up modem speed.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Probably the author has registered "ambientcomputing.com" or something.
I already don't sit down "to use a computer". I sit down to watch a movie, play a game, write an article, read the news or create software. The machine itself has faded into the background now that we've finally managed to the the darn things functioning most of the time so you don't spend half your waking hours just babysitting the operating system (can you tell I'm not a windows user?).
This trend has been going on for a long time and is continuing smoothly. Yes, the machine fades more and more into the background. Both my car and my HomePod have voice interfaces and hide the fact that they're essentially computers attached to a gadget. Robots have made a lot of progress now that machine learning is real (well, computing speed became fast enough. There's little in machine learning that wasn't invented 20 years ago, but we can finally run it on consumer hardware in real-time).
Sure, in 20 more years we will have computers in everything, reacting to sensor data, voice input and such. But that's just smart electronics. It'll blur the line to computers mostly because it's cheaper these days to put a general-purpose CPU and a full-blown OS in and write custom software than it was to build some custom electronics. From a security perspective, IoT is both a nightmare and an opportunity (where the window of opportunity is closing fast and almost nobody used it to do things the right way, but I'm not complaining it means job security for the next decades while we old guys can sell ourselves for great daily rates to all those startups who re-invented the wheel, made it square because time-to-market and now applaud our genius for telling them that it rolls better when it's round).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Keyboard and mouse are primitive. Voice, slightly less primitive"
Actually the keyboard and mouse are extremely good for the tasks they were designed for. Try saying "int main left round bracket int A-R-G-C comma char star star A-R-G-V right round bracket left curly bracket..."
etc faster than I can type the equivalent.
Similarly good luck using photoscope going "ok, do a transform from that point there, no left a bit, no right a bit, no there, THERE! , yes thats it, now drag that down from 10 pixels back ... no TEN, oh FFS, wheres my mouse..."
Article poorly defines nevertheless real class of computers that did come to prominence.
Follow the examples, not how author poorly defines the area of these examples in words.
The key word is interaction, not the fact that computers operate in the background without people knowing it.
Fitbit in your list is the only relevant example.
What author talks about is about UI. Where UI is something that you control less and less with your conscience, and more and more by something that you can't control with your brain.
fitbit monitors your pulse and pressure and computes based on that UI. Alexa monitors your spontaneous desires to buy things during advertising seasons. Almost. You still have to add "Alexa" because lawsuits.
One of non-Tesla American car manufacturers monitors your pupil activity to detect if you are fully aware of driving while using modern car assist technologies that do not require your driving input for quite long periods of time now.
Tesla uses the touch of your hand for the same purpose, but it's the same thing.
Soon the computers will detect you shivering and warm you up with a whiff of a warm air from nearby air duct nozzle. Or detect your body head via infrared monitors and cool you off with a whiff of a gentle San Diego night breeze.
There are plenty of independent driving factors that will help these sort of technologies take larger and larger share of the market:
- aging population that (a) can't catch up with modern computing (b) loses sanity
- necessity to know and exploit what consumer _really_ feels about things to personalize the marketing
These two giant factors are pretty solid.
Besides, we have already invented all these devices zillion times over in our Sci-Fi literature. This sort of computing have been a collective dream of humanity for a long time now.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The world is not shifting to ambient computing but rather ambient computing is spreading into the world.
Ambient computing is very prominent already and from where I sit right now in my living room, I can see two actual computers (the laptop I'm working on and a Raspberry Pi that is my home server) but the number of embedded CPUs is much higher: TV, sound bar, smart light, settop box, BluRay player, calculator, smartphone, landline phone, VoIP box, printer, camera, MiFi box, ...) that's at least twelve CPUs, so ambient computing is here and has been here for a long time already.
Voice control is never going to be relevant for a lot of computer work -- especially if you are working next to other people. I was recently working next to a small room with 20+ programmers, coding like mad. Imagine they were doing that coding by talking to their computers and the twin brothers had to be separated as the computers could not distinguish them from each other. Or how the noise level would slowly rise as each programmer is trying to get through to their computer instead of it picking up the neighbour's voice. Or how difficult it would be to concentrate in such an environment. No, that ain't gonna happen. (Probably going to be a famous embarrassment like 640kB is enough memory for any job -- Hi Bill!)
Voice control is fine for some things when working alone (retouching photos, for example, with commands like "Brush size 200" or "Hide smoothing layer", only much retouching will be automated too so less human retouching will be needed) and many things that are intermittent like "Turn on the lights in the living room" or "What is the temperature in Anchorage right now".
I was watching someone on his phone going through Instagram postings, which was an exercise in flick; flick; press; tap, tap, tap; press; flick; flick; ... It is hard to imagine that could be better (or quicker) done with voice commands but easy to imagine how irritating the voice commands would be to others.
Being a sour, misanthropic curmudgeon, who values his privacy, my biggest concern is the amount of information ambient "computers" will "leak" (by design or by accident) to third parties.I have no big secrets and definitely nothing that would cause me major embarrassment (maybe a few raised eyebrows), but I still close the bathroom door when I'm out and about, just like I try to stop the information leaks online to the extent I can.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
...we do really need
Greed is the root of all evil.
for new sales slogans.
To cite the article's actual example of The Bad Old Way, how exactly would I balance my checking account with ambient computing? Would it just balance itself and have my livingroom speaker tell me if anything was off?
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