A computer in your hand

Not so long ago, my laptop was my preferred device to use after hours. Relaxing on the couch, I can check my work email, catchup on the news, read research papers, or enjoy reading books. As technology advanced, I could also stream videos and shows at my leisure without commercial interruptions, that for the last 10 years or so, I had no need for a cable subscription or a TV.

Then came tablets. I was not one of the early adopters, since laptops were sufficiently advanced at the time: they were faster, had a keyboard and a better screen resolution, and the short battery life was not a deterrent. An electric outlet was always close by, and I could still work while the laptop is charging.

Then came kids, and the chaos associated with them. Kids have a natural talent where they know exactly when you need to focus on something that’s not them or when you’ve been sitting down for longer than a minute, and they are compelled to rectify such injustice. This leads to a lot of work interruptions, lots of standing up and sitting down, putting the laptop aside, sometimes locking or unlocking the screen, and closing or opening the laptop lid with the eventual sleep and hibernation.  At the time, laptops had longer wakeup cycles, and you could not get back to what you were doing without waiting for a couple of minutes till the laptop became operable again. At this point, the laptop started becoming less convenient, and it was time to shift to the tablet world.

 Tablets are great consumption devices; you can read easily on them especially with their now larger screens, or you can watch movies, and consume other media. They started with terrible support for producing content: it was difficult to type an email, a document, or even a short sentence on the smaller touchscreen keyboard. With all the error correction, they were much slower than using a real keyboard, and not as convenient.

Then technology advanced again, and dictation and speech recognition became better. Also tablets became smaller, and phone became bigger and more performant, with large amounts of storage. Sometimes ridiculous storage, as my current smartphone has 256GB of space, comparable to my top of the line laptops of yesteryear. As a result, most of my afterhours consumption and production is done on my trusty smartphone, with dictation taking place of typing. The convenience of holding the phone with one hand and attending to the kids demands with the other is hard to describe. Moreover, setting the phone aside to use both hands, and then picking it up again and unlocking the screen to get back to the task at hand is almost instantaneous. Now everyone is happy because of mobility and convenience.

The vision of a computer at your fingertips is not new, but is starting to materialize now, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds with either virtual or augmented reality. Perhaps one day as Ray Kurzweil predicted in his book “the singularity is near”, we won’t have to hold phones or tablets, but instead have nanobots inside our bodies manipulating our neuron connections, and helping augment what we see and feel without using any external screens. A bit futuristic and farfetched perhaps, but sure could beat donning a heavy headset over one’s head. The computer at your fingertips will change to a computer in your neurons, or literally a computer in your fingertips.