Intel ...ON THE FUTURE OF... Computing
From new computer designs that will save your back and eyes, to keeping your digital footprint secure and protecting you from online harassers, here’s how computers will change in the years to come.
MELISSA GREGG IS a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, and whose work involves researching how people use their devices, and working that into Intel’s strategies. She’s part of the team developing Project Athena, a template for a new generation of laptops designed to address recent changes in how we work as a society.
Do you think there’s an important distinction between a more traditional computer with a full interface, and simpler devices or appliances that have invisible software?
I think that there’s an interesting continuum right now where the visibility, or the literacy required of computing, is much broader than it once was. It’s very easy to talk to an Echo or a Google Home. It doesn’t require you to have a great deal of programming knowledge in order to have the end result of knowing what the weather’s going to be.
But at the other end, you have a lot of options for people who are then highly literate in engineering and software to be able to modularise or change or optimise their device, depending on the task they have, or their expertise, or their desired experience thereafter. So that growth in opportunity, and maybe the democratising impulse of technology innovation, is something to be quite excited about.
Intel, as with many phone makers, is building AI into its chips. Now that it’s in so many devices, what’s the next way it will help productivity and the way people use computers generally?
With Project Athena, one of the things we’re really excited about is making the laptop more responsible and helpful, by having the device be more intelligent. In our research, we’re certainly seeing that the expectation from users is that their laptop should be as responsive as their phone. It shouldn’t slow them down. It shouldn’t have extra barriers to getting them up and running with what they want to do.
AI can do a lot of things to know where the device is, and to learn what it is that you want to get done depending on where it is. Some of that may be optimising things on the software side, such as knowing which apps I prefer to use at this time of day, or helping me get something done more quickly using different forms of input – whether we want to see a range of different things at once on a range of different screens, for example, if that’s more convenient for me.
People do so much work now on phones, but that’s terrible for our posture. When you’re thinking about the possible new shape of devices, are you also looking at the ergonomics of using them long-term?
We have a fantastic user experience design team who have been experimenting with exactly these kinds of options. Honeycomb Glacier is one example of a form-factor that has a hinge that allows you to move the screen higher, and have the display in two different locations. So you can have different forms of content in front of you at once.
And that ability to move up and down, and have the right hinges and architecture – it’s all very complex stuff. But working with the design teams alongside the architect, that’s the kind of solution you can come up with.
We’ve done a number of studies of people working from home, across the world, about that level of flexibility, and the challenges of having the same sort of ergonomic setup when you’re not in a traditional office environment, and how that becomes the user’s responsibility and burden.
We’re definitely trying to find ways to make the laptop more accommodating for those different ways of working. Because it’s true, a lot of the people I’ve been interviewing over the last year are concerned about the amount of time they’re spending on a screen, and they’re concerned about making sure that their eyesight, for example, is not being severely affected by that. So other things that we’ve already seen on laptops that I think we’ll see more of are things to do with the screen display, and the composition of blue light – or not blue, depending on the time of day.
Is there a difference in what personal computing looks like in the future compared to professional computing?
To me, the real growth over the last ten years especially has been in this blurring between personal and professional identities. That’s something I’ve written about in the past, really going back to the rise of social media platforms. These platforms have been very successful by breaking down that distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘professional’. The kinds of
people that we’re designing for with Project Athena are independent professionals, many of whom are choosing to run their own business based on their own reputation, based on their brand. And the expectation that comes with that includes having to constantly perform your brand, in a range of digital platforms and online forums.
So in many ways, I think this new generation hasn’t had much of a choice about whether they can maintain personal and professional distinctions, because the nature of work has changed. The nature of employability has changed.
But at the same time, I think that makes people extremely conscious about the sorts of things they do share, and how they want to be seen as a professional, versus the things that they keep to themselves.
I’ve certainly seen in the research over the last year that we’re starting to see people having very clear ideas about what they will put online, and what they won’t. And that, to me, is something that is really a reflection of people’s awareness now of the impact of some of these bigger companies, and that we were sharing perhaps a little too much in the early days.
What are the biggest pain points for people that you think you should be able to solve within a new generation of computers?
One thing that’s really important for the kinds of users we’re talking about is a level of protection for the amount of data and information that they have accumulated in a career. Just having access to the level of ontological security of knowing that things are backed up, and knowing that things are going to be available and searchable when so much of your life has been digitised – I think people have a lot of anxiety about losing records and files and accomplishments when working at speed. They don’t always have time to save their work and organise it in such a way that’s manageable.
But I think the other thing that’s really of concern to me is that more and more people are making a living online through the reputation economy, and don’t have the ongoing security of full-time employment.
What do we need to do on the technology side to make sure that they’re safe from the kinds of negative behaviour that you can sometimes see on the internet? Particularly when you’re interacting with audiences and anonymous patrons and other people who may be able to do nasty things if you don’t have the right level of protection and analysis and care.
Is there something that can be done by the user’s computer, rather than the platforms, to help people targeted by that sort of negative behaviour?
It’s another thing that we’re in the exploration phase for. For example, in the gaming context, it’s how you could monitor and perhaps provide a solution for toxicity, for the kinds of interactions that may get out of hand, and that put people at risk online. That would be a dialogue between the local computer and cloud – especially with the way that gaming is going today.
And if you’re making a living based on Facebook or Instagram likes, what are the protections we could innovate so that people have a way of defending themselves if their profiles are under attack? These are some of the big issues of our time, and we’re seeing a lot of that in the media, too, of how the human intelligence – of intervening at the right time to protect people from harm – may not be keeping up. And so that is one of the ways we hope AI will be most helpful for users in the future.
“We’re trying to find ways to make the laptop more accommodating.”