The Way of the Future for Computing

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The Way of the Future for Computing

Computer technology is changing faster than ever. It is interacting with our daily lives and helping us make choices. The next step will be for the technology to make the decisions and choices for us. It will help us do the shopping, or will schedule our day for us. Computer technology will enable people “to do more by doing less”. That at least is the hopes and dreams of the M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) team that is working on a project called Oxygen.

In the past computers were huge, taking up whole walls of buildings, and incredibly expensive. Then they were able to fit on desktops. Now we’re able to carry them around with us. You can’t go anywhere without seeing them. The vision of the Oxygen Project is “in the future, computation will be freely available everywhere, like batteries and power sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe”. (mit.edu) computation will be in the human world, able to handle our goals and needs. There won’t be any need to carry personalized devices, such as phones, laptops, or etc. around with you. “Instead, “anonymous” devices, either handheld or embedded in the environment, will bring computation to us, no matter where we are or in what circumstances.” (mit.edu) The devices will become so familiar to a person that they will be able to find any information or software that we need. There will be no more typing or clicking needed. You won’t have to learn a computer language.

Instead, you will be able to talk naturally with speech, vision, and phrases that describe your objectives. The rest the computer will handle.

There are many aspects to the oxygen project to make it as successful as M.I.T. would like it to be. I can’t cover them all because I don’t want to write a book, but I will discuss the automation part of it. This is a branch of the user technologies. User technologies is what everyone will work with or use like a telephone.

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