The Aim of Computer Technology

Please see this interesting video presented at the Wharton Business Tech Conference by Stephen Elop of Microsoft about a vision of 2019. Of course the gadgets are amazing and all of the actors are very attractive and seem well-to-do. And that's what a vision of future ought to be. But it got me thinking about what was the common thread connecting all of the scenarios beyond the basic premise that by 2019 we'll be completely wired.

I believe it's all about finding things: information, your car, evidence of a medical condition, a product in a store, your bank balance, your friends, a restaurant and so on. And before you can find the things you want, you must decide what it is you wish to find. In other words you must define your search. If you accept that ongoing convergence of networks, computing, information storage, data management and most forms of communications that can use these tools provide the primary advantage of delivering information at blazing speeds, then we must ask how best to use this advantage.

There are two means of attacking this problem. Most strategies near as I can tell depend on at least some of both means. The things you're looking for must be cataloged in such a manner that they can be found and accessed by whatever system you're using. But the ideal system must also know a lot about you to cache the information you most likely would wish to find most often, how you prefer it to organized, when you want the information and how you wish it to be sent to you. It is this side of a search that I wonder about.

In many situations, an efficient search is one where the parameters of what you wish to find are very well defined. I don't mean exactly to the dotted 'i' or the crossed 't' but in a contextual basis that narrows your search to not the single best choice of what you're looking for but to the top 10 or 20 choices. Efficient searches would also build on the experience of prior searches. Various search engines strive to accomplish this based on very little information input from the searcher. But the vision of 2019 presented in this video will require a lot more input from the searcher to complete the real time, mobile and continuous searches the user would make as they go about there business in this brave new world.

So where is all of the information from the searcher side accumulated? Who stores this information, authorizes access and secures it? What rights do we sacrifice to gain such convenience and power of this world? Where will the line between our personal privacy and society's collective need to know be drawn in 2019? Now that's a video I'd like to see.