Pictures in Our Heads
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We’re in the middle of a huge platform shift in computing and most of us don’t even know it. The transition is from desktop to mobile and is as real as earlier transitions from mainframes to minicomputers to personal computers to networked computers with graphical interfaces. And like those previous transitions, this one doesn’t mean the old platforms are going away, just being diminished somewhat in significance. All of those previous platforms still exists. And desktops, too, will remain in some form when the mobile conversion is complete, though we are probably no more than five years from seeing the peak global population of desktop computers. We’d be there right now if we’d just figured out the I/O problem of how to stash a big display in a tiny device. But we’re almost there. That’s what this column is largely about.
I’ve been thinking about this topic ever since I wrote a column on an iPhone. It wasn’t easy to do, but I researched and wrote the column, loaded it to WordPress and added graphics, all by jabbing fingers at that tiny screen. It was for me an important test of what was possible and confirmed to me what I’d been guessing — that the iPhone is the first real device for the new mobile platform. Not a great device, but as Adam Osborne used to preach, it is an adequate device, and in the early days adequate is quite enough.
This seminal role for the iPhone is mainly by chance, I think. Its success is deserved no more than it is undeserved. The role could have fallen to Android or WebOS if they had been earlier or even to Windows Mobile if it had been a bit better. Steve Jobs proved his luck again by dragging his feet just long enough to fall into the sweet spot for a whole new industry. That’s not to say he can’t still blow it, but he has the advantage for now.
It’s important to understand just how quickly things are changing. Part of this comes down to the hardware replacement cycle for these devices. A PC generation is traditionally 18 months long and most of us are unwilling to be more than two generations behind, so we get a new desktop or notebook every 36 months. Mobile devices don’t last that long, nor are they expected to. The replacement cycle is 18 months, reinforced by customer contract terms that give us a new device every couple of years in return for staying a loyal customer. Mobile hardware generations last nine months, and 18 tends to be the maximum time any of us use a single device.
Think about it. This means that mobile devices are evolving twice as fast as desktops ever did. This just about equals the rate at which wireless network bandwidth is declining in price and matches, too, the faster-than-Moore’s Law growth of back-end services. Think about those first iPhones compared to the ones shipping today. In less than two years the network has increased in speed by an easy 2X and the iPhone processor speed has doubled, leading to a device that is at least four times more powerful than it was originally. It’s a much more capable device than it was, yet the price has only gone down and down.
This is not a celebration of the iPhone: the same performance effects apply equally to all mobile platforms.
Now just imagine what it says for the smart phones to come. In another two years they’ll be eight times as powerful as they are today, making them the functional equivalents of today’s desktops and notebooks. If only we could do something about those tiny screens and keyboards.
The keyboard is a tough one. In one sense it isn’t hard to imagine it being handled through voice input. That’s how they did it on Star Trek, right? But there was a problem with Star Trek computing: the interface is what I think of as interrogational. Kirk or Scotty asked the ship’s computer (a mainframe, obviously) a question that always had an answer that could be relayed in a handful of words. The answer was “yes,” “no,” “Romulan Bird of Prey,” or “kiss your ass goodbye, Sulu.” There’s never any nuance with an interrogational interface and not much of a range of outputs. It’s okay for running a starship or a nuclear power plant, but by being only able to speak it is limited to what words alone can do.
I attribute this, by the way, to Gene Roddenberry’s work as a writer. I doubt that he saw word output as a limitation, since his product was, after all, words. TV is radio with pictures, and the words really count a lot. But try to use them to simulate a nuclear meltdown with any degree of precision or prediction and they’ll fail you.
Our future mobile devices will use words for input, sure, but words alone won’t be enough. Still, between voice recognition, virtual keyboards, and cutting and pasting on those little screens, there’s a lot that can be done. It’s the output that worries me more.
I first wrote about this a decade ago when I heard about how Sony was supporting research at the University of Washington on retinal scan displays — work that eventually resolved into products from a Washington State company called Microvision. They’ll shine a laser into your eye today, painting a fabulous scene on the back of your eyeball in what appears to be perfect safety, but I have a hard time imagining the broad acceptance of such displays by billions (yes, BILLIONS) of users any more than I expect that Bluetooth earphones will survive a decade from now. Too clunky.
I think we’re headed in another direction and that direction is — as always — an outgrowth of Moore’s Law. Processors get smaller every year and as they get smaller they need less energy to run. Modern processors are also adapting more asynchronous logic — another topic I started writing about 10 years ago that offers dramatic energy savings.
We’re at the point right now where primitive single-pixel displays can be built into contact lenses. They act as user interfaces for experimental devices like automatic insulin pumps. This already exists. A patch of carbon nanotubes on your arm continuously monitor blood glucose levels, driving a pump that keeps your insulin supply right where it should be. Any problem with the pump or the levels is shown by a red dot that appears in your field of view courtesy of that contact lens. The data connection between pump and eyeball is wireless. The power to run that display is wireless too, since the contact lens display scavenges RF energy out of the air to run, courtesy of that mobile phone on your belt and that WiFi access point on the ceiling.
As long as we’re personally connected to the network we’ll have enough power to run such displays. No more airplane mode.
And while that display is a single pixel today, we can pretty easily predict at what point it could be the equivalent of HDTV. Except I don’t expect we’ll ever get there. That’s because, thanks to Ray Kurzweil’s singularity — that point at which everyday machines have more computing cycles than I do — we’ll soon have so much excess processing power that mere physical interfaces will be boring and not necessary.
Here’s my problem with the singularity: I don’t want to work for my computer, much less for my microwave oven, both of which are supposed to be way smarter than me by 2029, according to Ray. My way around this problem, in the Capt. Kirk tradition, is to find difficult jobs for all that computing power to keep it from interfering with my lifestyle.
So there’s a platform transition happening. We’re in the middle of it. The new platform is a mobile interface to a cloud network. And the way we’ll shortly communicate with our devices, I predict, will be through our thoughts. By 2029 (and probably a lot sooner) we’ll think our input and see pictures in our heads.
Think it can’t happen? Twenty years ago was Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 6. Twenty years from now computing won’t even be a device, just a service.
The “smart phone” is the true Second Generation Personal Computer. Clearly, it satisfies the information needs and desires of a lot of people. That is, it does everything they want when they’re not at work, where they use desktop systems. In the office, you use Office(tm).
So instead of its cash cows dominating the universe, suddenly Microsoft’s cash cows dominate only one galaxy in a suddenly expanded universe . . .
There you go, a hook for a whole ‘nother column.
“Twenty years ago was Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 6.”
Doesn’t really help your point. The interface and O.S. ain’t that much better in 20 years. e.g. it took Windows 7.0 twenty years to provide an easy command for putting two windows side-by-side (an then they have the nerve to brag about in a TV commercial). Even though 3.0 was called WindowS with an s.
My problem with the Singularity, though it is making a great platform for current hard science fiction (as opposed to pop sci fi) and a foil for post-Singularity fiction, it’s a canard. I’m not putting a copy of me in a computer. Because in the end, the mind living in the computer is a copy of you, not you. You’re going to die. A copy of the Mona Lisa is worth way less than the original for good reason.
Kurzweil is at best a pop-science tale-spinner. The basis of his claims are not more valid than the techno-babble in Star Trek.
Your mind on the computor does not get there by copying. It starts with an electronic prosthesis to your mind. It might only be a calculator or clock or phone but eventually you get more and more electronic functions added to your biological mind.
Then one day you notice that more of your mind is electronic than biological.
Then maybe a long time after that, you decide that the biological portion of your mind is an inconvienient limitation and you drop it.
Or maybe your electronic portion of your mind gets so spread out and diversified that you just forget where you left your tiny little biological bit of brain.
Excellent observations and thoughts. I can easily imagine contact lens as displays. But I still do not see what can replace the keyboard. A keyboard is nothing but symbolic logic interface. I can not speculate how it can be replaced, yet.
A thought based UI is orders of magnitude more advancement than Mac OS 6 to 10.6. Bob, you’ve said before we tend to overestimate technology influence in the short term and underestimate it in the long term (or something like that). I think you’re overestimating change here. For example apart from mobility, in what way is SMS more advanced than the voiced based communication of the 1950′s phone system? I bet in 20 years mobile technology will do much more by expanding what we use it for, but if we need to write a college thesis there will still be a QWERTY keyboard and some kind of word processor involved.
[...] Supplement: I, Cringley: Pictures In Our Heads [...]
Surely the future is Sixth Sense style projectors / movement recognition.
You are looking too hard at the problem. Most of the hotels have flat screen TV’s. A vga/dvi output would make for an excellent large display on travel. So a folding or small keyboard with mouse would round out what you need in the hotel room. On the go the small screen is sufficient.
[...] Shipping More Units It’s important to understand just how quickly things are changing. Part of this comes down to the hardware replacement cycle for these devices. A PC generation is traditionally 18 months long and most of us are unwilling to be more than two generations behind, so we get a new desktop or notebook every 36 months. Mobile devices don’t last that long, nor are they expected to. The replacement cycle is 18 months, reinforced by customer contract terms that give us a new device every couple of years in return for staying a loyal customer. Mobile hardware generations last nine months, and 18 tends to be the maximum time any of us use a single device. [...]
[...] Shipping More Units It’s important to understand just how quickly things are changing. Part of this comes down to the hardware replacement cycle for these devices. A PC generation is traditionally 18 months long and most of us are unwilling to be more than two generations behind, so we get a new desktop or notebook every 36 months. Mobile devices don’t last that long, nor are they expected to. The replacement cycle is 18 months, reinforced by customer contract terms that give us a new device every couple of years in return for staying a loyal customer. Mobile hardware generations last nine months, and 18 tends to be the maximum time any of us use a single device. [...]
Regarding the problem of input, those tiny keyboards have caused the adaptation of language to overcome their limitations: witness a teen’s texting. It is an evolving, bona fide dialect with a grammar and a social glue to it’s users. We have always adapted instinctively to our unyielding devices. Those screens, however…
The thought interface is intriguing, for me, to say the least. Only price has prevented me from owning a BrainFingers(tm) headband and home research into mind over machine control. Only the bulkiness of heads up displays has prevented me from home research into mind over machine feedback. Both of these are the same old price point and endless march of progress design barriers to entry that Bob has so masterfully communicated time and again. For me the Singularity represents the true human 2.0 where our physical 1.0 five senses mind in body control begin to be supplanted by the sixth sense of mind out of body control, something I would suggest we’ve all been dreaming (and using to get from A to B all these eons and what seems to me to be the principle driver of all of this innovation in the first place.) For me the hand (keyboard), eye (monitor) and ear (auditory) interfaces by thought human 1.0 has always been where my 2.0 brain has been trapped, I’ve been handicapped all my life by bodily limitation.
[...] and Apple for the next generation of computing (a mobile generation, as Robert X. Cringely reminds us), Google seems to be willing to compromise on means as long as the ends are the same. For them web [...]
[...] an informed spectator of the digital world. Robert X. Cringely suggests that the solution is Pictures in Our Heads. He too sees a huge growth for mobile devices since the purchasing cycle is rapid and new [...]
Random thoughts…
While we’ve been making computers “smarter,” people have been getting dumbed down by advertising, by bad education, by political propaganda, etc. As Dave Frishberg sang, we’re “marooned in a blizzard of lies.”
Even honest research in honest journals is so overwhelming in quantity that it’s hard to sift through enough of it to find the gems. And worthwhile stuff can easily end up ignored. Who knows if a great general solution to some serious current problem was published in 1952, and forgotten? It doesn’t help that fueled partly by the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph, we have such an attitude of “tommorowism” that an idea from last night gets dismissed as “Oh, that’s so 12 hours ago!”
Maybe it will become trendy to respect the best of the past again, and “tomorrowism” will eventually be dismissed as “so 2009.”
Computers may become more clever, but can they become wise?
I suppose that the Singularity means that computers will be so powerful that we’ll be able to test the “million monkeys typing out Shakespeare” and other Darwinian ideas, that random variation can eventually lead to higher and higher intelligence. But what happens if it doesn’t work? Then we’re left with a big question.
Looks like sunglasses Myvu Personal Media Viewers 640X480 wearable video display http://myvutestsite.us/index.html
[...] bypass it and go straight to thought-controlled computers. On our own planet, labs are pursing thought-controlled UIs, and it’s easy to believe that this will be the ultimate UI: no words, no actions at all, [...]
Great post – As an rough gemstone cutting service provider this is interesting.I’m happy:glad I found this
This sounds like science fiction but I guess it could become reality. It would certainly be a strange concept to see it inside our minds and I can’t really imagine it yet but then I guess all great things are hard to imagine.
You may have not intended to do so, but I think you have managed to express the state of mind that a lot of people are in. The sense of wanting to help, but not knowing how or where, is one thing a lot of us are going through.
Mobile computing is on the rise these days. Maybe we will get a dual core powered cellphones in the future..:`
mobile computing nowadays is not yet very powerful compared to netbooks but time will come that it would become like that.:“