My Quora answer that’s pretty popular : (1) Phil Jones’s answer to What do you think computers will be like in 10 years?
Related to my previous story of trying to use the CHIP for work.
This is a $9 CHIP (Get C.H.I.P. and C.H.I.P. Prto)
It runs Debian. A couple of weeks ago, I took one travelling with me instead of my laptop to see what it would be like to use for real work.
I successfully ran my personal “productivity” software (three Python based wiki servers and some code written in Racket) from it. It also has a browser, Emacs and I was doing logic programming with minikanren library in Python. It runs Sunvox synth and CSOUND too, though I wasn’t working on those on this trip.
In 10 years time, that computing power will be under a dollar. And if anyone can be bothered to make it in this format, the equivalent of this Debian machine will be tantamount to free.
Of course most of that spectacular power will be wasted on useless stuff. But, to re-emphasize, viable computing power that you can do real work with, will be “free”.
The pain is the UI. How would we attach real keyboards, decent screens etc when we need them?
I HOPE that people will understand this well enough that our current conception of a “personal computer” will explode into a “device swarm” of components that can be dynamically assembled into whatever configuration is convenient.
I, personally, would LIKE the main processor / storage to live somewhere that’s strongly attached to my body and hard to lose (eg. watch or lanyard). I’d like my “phone” to become a cheap disposable touch-screen for this personal server rather than the current repository of my data.
I bought a cheap bluetooth keypad for about $8. It was surprisingly OK to type on, but connections with the CHIP were unreliable. In 10 years time, that ought to be fixed.
So, in 10 years time, I personally want a computer on my wrist that’s powerful to do all my work with (that means programming and creating music). That can be hooked up to some kind of dumb external keyboard / mouse / screen interface (today the Motorola Lapdock is the gold-standard) that costs something like $20. Sure, I’ll probably want cloud resources for sharing, publishing, storage and even high-performance processing, AI and “knowledge” etc.
And, of course, I want it to run 100% free-software that puts me in control.
This is all absolutely do-able.