

On the Future of Computing - Garbage
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-future-of-computing.html

======
TomOfTTB
In many ways this vision is why I believe in ChromeOS.

I don't believe you'll ever see desktops with ChromeOS on it. But I think the
line between Desktop and everything else will blur to the point that desktops
will eventually stop existing (and I think it will happen much faster than the
20 years this author predicts)

At that point the laptop won't be a desktop replacement as much as it will be
a way to quickly and reliably take a little bit of functionality with you. So
while your TV and your table and your walls will be your home computing
devices the laptop will be something that you want to just open up and do a
few discrete functions on.

When you look at it that way ChromeOS' priorities are in the right place.
Speed, simplicity almost to a fault and highly redundant.

------
loup-vaillant
Benjamen Bayart said: "The printing press allowed people to read. The internet
will allow them to write." Sorry, but people won't have that right if
everything is in the cloud, because it will be controlled by a handful of
giga-corporations. If you think this future is likely, I humbly suggest you
screw that, and fight for an alternative.

Here's one : (1) 5 years from now, people will begin to distrust for-profit
corporation with their privacy. (2) 10 years from now, the FreedomBox will be
ubiquitous. (3) 15 years from now, consumer awareness and demand (triggered by
the FreedomBox) will raise upload capacity up to download capacity. Likely
results are ubiquitous (and _unstoppable_ ) self publishing, e-mail that's
actually private, and distributed encrypted back-up that just works. This
should help flourish public debates and actual democracies.

------
6ren
My understanding was that voice transcription was stuck at around 95% accuracy
(one word in twenty wrong!), and wiki says only 80%
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#Performance> Of course,
you'll do far better in severely curtailed domains (eg. recognizing digits,
since there's only 10).

Is there other evidence for voice transcription improvement? Otherwise, this
sounds a bit like "AI is just around the corner".

------
scorpion032
[http://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_n...](http://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html)

Juan Enrique shares his insights on similar lines.

"It would be mildly arrogant to presume, the purpose of the universe from 13.5
billion years, is we men. Home Sapiens give way to a new breed of Living
creatures called Homo Evolutus, that controls its own existance" - my
paraphrase, from what I remember. A must watch.

------
jessriedel
> Self driving cars will have begun to become common.

This is, unfortunately, not true. It it _were_ true, its (massively positive)
effects would dwarf everything else mentioned in the essay.

~~~
nene
Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some
pretty good prototypes.

Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects? I can see less
car accidents and reduced amount of mundane driving, but I wouldn't consider
those effects as dwarfing everything else.

~~~
jessriedel
> Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some
> pretty good prototypes.

We've had pretty good prototypes for more than 20 years. There are two huge
barriers:

(1) The progress in computer vision, like voice recognition, has slowed.
People had pretty good speech recognition since the 1980's, but the gap
between "pretty good" and "good enough to use" remains uncrossed. The gap in
computer vision for cars will be even wider because mistakes will be much more
costly.

(2) Even with all the tech problems solved, the regulatory hurdles to
implementing this are staggering.

Suffice it to say, I would make a "Long Bet" (longbets.org/) against
autonomous cars making up 5% of all cars in 20 years, with 10:1 odds.

> Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects?

Car accidents cost the US about $250 Billion per year, with 45,000 killed.
Autonomous driving has the potential to decrease this by at least an order of
magnitude (most accidents are due to driver error). That's a _mind-bogglingly
staggering_ benefit.

10 million Americans commute more than an hour each day, which is $25 Billion
per year at _minimum_ wage. There's much more lost among the rest of the
commuters, and a factor of 4 to account for realistic wages.

I could go on about how autonomous driving would also (a) drastically reduce
the total number of cars we'd need, (b) cut emissions and gas usage by
allowing ubiquitous slip streaming, (c) virtually eliminate the need for
nearby parking in cities, freeing up vast amounts of extremely valuable real
estate.

~~~
orangecat
Yes, it's absolutely huge. A while back I did a back-of-the-envelope
calculation trying to account for the direct and indirect economic benefits,
and it was on the order of a trillion dollars a year. That might even be low,
because I don't think I considered your points about parking and real estate.

I would have agreed with your barriers, but I'm very encouraged by Google's
experiments. They show that you can deploy automated vehicles alongside normal
traffic, and that getting government permission isn't an insurmountable
problem.

If it does gain traction, there will be a point where our collective
rationality will be tested. It's nearly certain that occasional system
malfunctions will occur resulting in deaths. Hopefully we'll be able to
realize that such incidents are on balance vastly less harmful than the damage
done by human drivers, and won't allow manufacturers to be sued out of
existence or shut down by demagoguing politicians.

------
scorpion032
"Computing will cease to be something separate and discrete. The internet will
be a literal extension of your brain."

Can't wait.

