Let’s consider this example
Two person A and B are on a vacation to a very remote place, the place that is disconnected from the world, that place won’t have any sort of connections, no WIFI, no public telephone lines but the nature and beaches.
In a remote place like this, those 2 person would have nothing to get distracted, and they can freely go and enjoy their personal time amongst the nature.
Once they reach back hotel, they got connected again as the hotel has the WIFI. Once they get connected, their phones starts to get these push notifications, about each and every other. And they had lots of them, since, every single application or service on our phone demands our attentions.
So as a result, they got disconnected from each other.
Keep in mind, that it is just their phone that demanded so much of their attention as they were on a vacation, and they were not carrying any laptops and tablets.
Now let’s just consider this graph:
Let’s understand this graph:
- 1990 (The Unplugged Era) – There were no connected devices
- 1995 (The Internet Era) – One connected device, i.e. Computer, and with this one device came Email, came first notification “You got a new mail”
- 2005 (The Mobile Era) – 3 connected devices, Mobile, Computers and Tablets, We think that this adds more value to our life, but these devices are not smart enough, they don’t know which of the devices I am currently using, so they by default, pushes the notifications on each one of them
- 2020 (The Internet of Things Era) – There will be more than 20 connected devices, our fridge, our chair, our watch, our car, all these devices would require our attention.
- 2035 – By the end of 2035, we would have more than 100 connected devices per person, and when all these devices want our attention, we won’t even pay attention, it will be like background noises to us.
Let’s go back 100 years:
There was a birth of this technology, which was very bad at that time called “electricity”. It was very hard to produce, not affordable, and caused fires in people’s home. People did not wanted to put something in walls of their houses that can cause fire, and burn everything.
But as the technology evolved, it became cheaper, accessible, and better, we have it everywhere, in our homes, in our phone, and even in our body, if you have pacemaker.
We don’t really think about it at all.
Coming back to the present:
Special type of AI called context awareness is going to take place that gives these devices the ability to know the environment you are in, so that your tablet would not notify you about a new episode when you are in a meeting.
Since, AI takes bit longer to start, we would still be facing this problem, and it will be getting much worse in next few years, but once AI will become capable, there will be this very cool thing called “Ubiquitous Computing”.
It means, to add a device into the network, without it adding the friction, but adding its value and this is what digital revolution is all about.
Some similar happened with the electricity as well, it became ubiquitous, it got integrated in our daily life’s that we don’t pay attention to it.
And this is exactly that is going to happen with computing.