Why we’ve spent 40 years trying to get rid of the computer.
People don’t want a faster computer. They want less computer.
For decades, we’ve been building more and more powerful devices. More storage. More programs. More possibilities. And yet they haven’t really become easier to use.
At least we can now do things much faster – things we never needed to do in the first place.
Maybe that’s because we were never all that interested in computers. Only in what we could do with them.
The computer used to live in the basement. Then on the desk. Then it fit in a bag. And finally in a pocket. With every step, it got smaller – and more taken for granted.
The mouse made commands simpler. The smartphone put almost everything a tap away. Streaming saved us from dealing with music files. The cloud made local hard drives unnecessary for many tasks.
And now there’s AI.
Suddenly, we don’t need to know which program to open or which command to type for every task. Often it’s enough to describe what we want to do.
Of course, that doesn’t always work. And not every task can be handled in a conversation. But the direction is interesting: the computer no longer just needs to be operated. It’s starting to understand what we mean.
That changes our relationship with technology, too. We no longer learn what a device can do. The device learns what we want.
So maybe the future of the computer isn’t even more computer.
It’s less of it.
Until only the idea is left.
