How our daily lives will change when computers vanish
What happens when the computers around you all but disappear?
Tiny sensors built into walls, household products, what you’re wearing and perhaps your own body will make computers invisible to the eye, but responsive to a gesture, voice and perhaps your movement as you walk into a room.
It is still very early, but the era of ambient computing is slowly taking shape, whether in the form of the voice-driven smart speaker on your kitchen countertop, or via the IoT (Internet of Things) devices and appliances that are designed to blend into the background. It’s a vision fused by advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and cloud computing.
Stakeholders include the giants of tech: Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Samsung, among them. But disruption may also come from companies not yet on the public’s radar.
“The interesting ones will be… the Ubers of the IoT and the ambient world,” says Daryl Cromer, vice
president of subsystem research at Lenovo Research. “And that’s what we’re still looking for.”
No one is suggesting that screens and keyboards are going to go away entirely or that you’ll stop reaching for the smartphone.
“We still believe devices will play a huge part. They do certain tasks better than anything else (and) provide a level of privacy, convenience and security that cannot be matched,” Cromer says.
But some of the regular features of our daily life may get computer-driven — without the tap of a finger. Imagine this:
Your autonomous car pulls into your driveway and the garage door opens, the front door unlocks and the lights inside the house flip on. The temperature is already set to your liking and the ideal music for the moment starts to play, tuned to your very mood. You’re reminded of a conference call you have to jump on an hour later and are told it’s time to take your medicine.
Invisible sensors, feeding your movements and routines into cloudcomputing servers where artificial intelligence systems absorb and refine the directions they give to the smart devices, will help make such scenarios happen.
The computers are watching
This ambient computing future is straight out of the world sci-fi writers envisioned for us decades ago — from leaps in communication and medicine to the potential for Big Brother-type surveillance.
Facebook is working on tech that will let you “hear” with your skin, an advance that could help people with hearing disorders.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil of Google predicts that in the 2030s, “we will have devices that are as powerful as your cellphones today that are the size of blood cells” to keep us healthy.
There’s a perilous side, too. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking have raised alarms that this artificial intelligencedriven future could lead to World War III, a dark cataclysm for human civilization.
It’s imperative that the companies pushing ambient computing pay heed to privacy and security. The specter of a government or organization exploiting these smart, data-hungry devices looms large.
Ambient intelligence is likely to expand through the continuing widespread deployment of sensors into devices that are capable of not only gathering information but reporting it back to systems run by the tech giants.
Vast amounts of data will reside in the cloud, while devices need to have “local” intelligence as well.
Battery life is crucial. “If you have to think about charging something, it becomes less habitual,” says Dave Limp, senior vice president for devices & services at Amazon.com. “In an ambient computing world, the place where it works best is where it’s always on. That’s why I don’t think we’ve quite figured out ambient computing on mobile yet.”
Eventually, more devices and sensors will talk to one another and begin to understand your “intent” or objective. Services constructed around such objectives will presumably follow.
Amazon’s push into an ambient intelligent environment is built around Alexa, the digital voice inside the company’s Echo-branded speakers.
“We do envision this world where Alexa can be everywhere — in devices we make, in devices third parties make, in homes, in coffeemakers (and) dishwashers,” says Toni Reid, vice president of Alexa Experience & Echo Devices at Amazon.com. “We definitely think that voice is the future of how we control technology.”
Google is pursuing a similar strategy around the Google Assistant and Google Home product line. Apple’s path includes Siri, an upcoming HomePod smart speaker, and the company’s HomeKit smart-home platform. Samsung owns the SmartThings line of smart home products and has teamed up through its Harman Kardon subsidiary with Microsoft on a speaker that uses Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant.
“I think ambient in the home is going to take a lot of different forms, but it’s going to be driven, especially for the next several years, around smart speakers and their extensions,” said Bob O’Donnell, the president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research.
Making AI assistants more human
Another goal is to make our exchanges with the digital assistants more conversational.
Machines “need to be able to look at my face and say, ‘Am I happy or sad?’ and based on that decide what is the right thing to do,” said Jamshid Vayghan, the global chief technology officer at IBM Global Business Services.
Does that mean Alexa will get testy if you’re short with her? Probably not. But “you can imagine scenarios where based on your level of frustration maybe our responses change,” Amazon’s Reid says.