Data Dreams

We have received a number of responses. I will probably not be able to index them properly.

I want my machine to monitor my email as I read it and automatically add appointments to my calendar without my having to interrupt my reading to change screens (even going from Inbox to Calendar) and enter the data. Simply select with the mouse and have it extract the dates and times, perhaps popping up to ask if there’s something unclear.

My idea is partially possible today, but I would like a whole lot more flexibility. I would like to be able to say “Follow this line of information for me, among credible sources, find me a complete legible information, credit each piece of information with the respective source. If something is repeated among the sources, credit each of the sources. Figure the general meaning, so different writing styles communicating the same fact can be ammalgamated, with different interpretations being credited to the respective source.” The main point there would be the grouping and summarizing of the text, making it a lot easier to follow one subject, most probably something on the news. One other point would be a reasonable translation capacity, mostly with languages harder for one nonnative speaker to have conditions to do his/hers/its own translation. I would be thinking in something like portuguese (well, since I’m brazilian that wouldn’t be a problem, but for you, for example it probably would), chinese, japanese, russian and so on. It wouldn’t need to be good enough to do a decent translation of Dostoyevski, but should allow a reading of a newspaper or technical article in a bad english, but with the meaning mostly intact. By the way, thanks for the views column...

Have a system able to perform much as “BASE ONE” described by C.J. Cherryh in “THE VINDICATION”. Rereading that story caused my investigating the home automation products available at this time. With time, determination and a lot of money a system similar to that could be started (aka Bill Gates house) but I’d sure hate for the heat to go off in the middle of winter because the OS crashed.

My wish is simple in concept and difficult in practice. I want to store my books on my computer.

Enable me to pick and chose which shows I want to watch, and when. Advertising can still be there, and targeted or broad-based. Something more than ReplayTV or TiVo, which can only tape what is currently available(least as far as I know..)

Take notes for me on where I put stuff, and tell me how to find it. Even find it for me with the proper devices.

Scan all the books in the discount section of the book store, and point me to the ones I might want to purchase.

Do my grocery shopping, maybe help cook some foods. I’m not too good at estimating the differences between the “recommended” and what’ll produce the best results in my cookware.

Gardening, what to plant, when to plant, various suggestions on care. (This could apply to animals as well.). Hey, while I’m at it, I’d like an Autodoc from some of Niven’s books.

Adjust the lighting in my house both intensity and color scope to provide the best ambient moods. Could also apply to the air conditioning.

BTW: That person asking for the translation program should take a look at Babelfish on Altavista.com

1. I’d like it to unerringly identify and delete every piece of spam email I receive. All fraudulent come-ons would first be forwarded to the IRS and the relevant state taxing authority.

2. Upon detecting neo-Nazi propaganda posted in my favorite newsgroups (talk.politics.guns, etc.) my computer would by any means necessary, locate a valid email address for the poster (or his puppetmaster) and email him an electronic copy of the Torah from a centralized site accessing the net via a T-3.

Both of these things are either possible, or reasonably close to being possible, especially if you use Linux for email and newsreading. I don’t... yet.

Hey Jerry...read about your thesis on data dreams....but couldn’t help but remember your theory on the second computer revolution, that being easily programming one’s computer to do what one wants to do with it.

Speech capability - both recognition and response, so that I could actually tell my computer what to do, in plain English. I hate having to key in or mouse everything that happens with my computer. Parts of this are already here, imperfectly.

A bonus would be a selection of infinitely variable voices for my computer, until it had a female voice with a tidewater accent down perfectly.

I wish my computer could do languages. I mean REALLY do them—kind of like CP3O, but without the flaky personality.

Jerry: I would like The Computer to be the size of my palm (-pilot). But it'll be able to take speech input, for commands and dictation. Then you hook it to a nice big flat panel monitor and lo and behold! here is your desktop. No crashes, of course. One of the best things of the pilot is that is always where you left it, a mere milliseconds after pushing its ON button. Amazing and The Way Things Should Be. Then computers could probably claim to be a truly usable thing; now we're in the time where cars needed a guard several paces in front of them, waving a lamp- computers are in the 1905's as usability goes compared to cars. Pilots have the potential to be your Explorer or your Porsche, depending on extra equipment. A. Arancibia.

I have a layered dream. A whole infrastructure’s worth. I don’t mind giving it away, because it’s got several hundred lifetimes of work in it, at least.

Basically, I want the electronics to do whatever I want, whenever I want it, if I can afford it.

I want natural-language programming. I want a programming “slave” (an automaton) that takes a textual description of a task, combines it with a description of my general preferences, and writes the program for me. It can ask questions, but should preserve the answers for re-use with other programming tasks. It also should have a way for me to complain about a program, so that the program can be easily, incrementally improved. It should be able to keep all the old versions, indexed by complaint, and keep a separate set of versions for each person that uses the computer. It should be able to compile to hardware, not merely op-codes, if I want something to go fast.

For hardware, I want products to interoperate. I want support for the following data: numbers, dates, times (to the microsecond), text, pictures, pie-charts bar-charts and video, formulas, sound, telemetry and control outputs, in lists, arrays and heterogeneous documents. I also want storage, network and radio interfaces (broadcast and point-to-point) for all of the above, with pretty-good encryption, and thousand-year human-readable archival formats as standard options. At a minimum, I want to be able to transfer all like data types to and from any compatible hardware.

I want a standard infrastructure that will let me attach any vendor’s equipment for producing and measuring the above. I want the “bus” for attachments to come in PDA, luggable and desktop sizes.

Cost? I don’t mind if a PDA-sized video studio costs the same as a full-sized video studio, as long as it works just as well.

On the microship, the designer can (for example) press one button on his handy-talky, and have the ship’s automation patch the ship’s weather radio to the HT. The system has audio, video and RS-232 cross-bar switches under software control, a very adaptable, high performance system for integrating electronics from noncooperating vendors. There’s an ethernet on the side for data. There’s a voder for translating data into audio, patchable to any output. I, of course, also want voice-input. . .

I also want infrastructure to support the above two systems. I want hardware vendors to post tested textual descriptions of their software interfaces on the net, suitable for the above programming environment. I want context-based help systems for the above. I want built-in-tests for all of the above, too. I also want integrated payment options, so I can rent instead of buy, and if I buy, get automated refunds when something fails under warrantee.

For your mail headaches, you are trying to do something Outlook or Eudora was never designed to do. What you need is a listserver. The one I like best is Listserv (www.lsoft.com) which runs on many platforms and has a shareware version (Listserv lite) which can handle many of the full functions.

You set it up as a closed list, add subscribers manually, and set it up so that only specific users can post. You send one mail to the listserv and it takes care of getting them out, and handling some errors (only where the other end is correctly RFCwhatever compliant). The rest get bounced to an address you specify.

See if Earthlink or your other ISP(s) have one of these or would be willing to install it. If Listserv, I could help you set it up. I am the owner of 2 listserv lists already.

I’ll tell you what I want other people’s computers to do (since I support them)... I want a computer that stops you when you’re about to do something stupid, like delete a critical file. I want it to say “now, are you sure? If you do this, application X won’t be able to print.” If you answer “Yes” then I want it to reply “well, fine, but I’m keeping a copy and letting the smart people know you messed with it.” Then, I want the computer to tell me “Fred dumped his print drivers after three warnings” - prioritize the problem below other problems because FRED WAS WARNED, and let me solve the other problems, then get back to Fred and say “well, sorry for the delay, but you WERE WARNED”.

I want a system that KNOWS I am the systems administrator, and stops telling me to go to the systems administrator for help. I want a system that will tell me what the mysterious System Administrator is supposed to know (since it’s never in any of the manuals).

Finally, I want a system I can TRUST not to lie to me about the above, be 100% dependable so I can let my kids use it and not burst into tears after 45 minutes of painstaking effort coloring a picture only to have the app blow up in their faces. I want “save early, save often” to be a joke, not a warning. Most of all, I want a computer that, when I am old, can help me when the Alzheimer’s kicks in, and my family can trust it not to boot me out a window because of a corrupted DLL...

appointments to my calendar without my having to interrupt my reading to change

with the mouse and have it extract the dates and times, perhaps popping up to ask

Many years ago I worked on a program called InTouch (a Mac Personal Information Manager) that would let you do something similar with its database. You could select a name, hit a (user-defined) key, and it would look up the person’s address and paste it into the selection (useful for writing letters). Or you could select some text, hit a different key, and have that text added to your database. Columnists loved that feature, and most of our competitors did their best to come out with its equal in their products (difficult, because we were a free form database and they weren’t). But there’s a good chance that someone took the next logical step, and already implemented the above feature.

I am at website that has good information, but poorly designed navigation tools. Or, I want to navigate the website in a way the designers didn’t anticipate. My computer would be able to re-organize the information on the site that is meaningful to my task. Example: Show me all the Macintosh information on the Byte website, with summaries, while sorting out the trivial Mac references. Or, show me all the threads on this discussion board that deal with the topic of creationism versus evolution.

Something that lives on the desktop, and is not dependent on the web site operators to guess at my needs, since my needs might easily be completely off the wall.

How about being able to tell your computer what you wish to use it for next, so that it can automatically remove all unneccessary binary files from memory, and put them back when you’re done with that task.

On second thought, how about being able to load up just the drivers needed for the next task, like only loading the printer drivers when you need to print, and unloading them when you’re done. (My peripheral drivers always seem to interfere with 3d shootemups, like Unreal.)

I believe there is a program which will do most of your requested task (create a web page with thumbnail images, each one pointing to the original image).

Of course, my own preference would be to write a script to do this in Linux (I recently learned how to use “convert” create thumbnail images en masse), but you would probably be happy with the already-available solution from Pink Mouse.

“... she was a calligraphy enthusiast with a slight overbite and hair the color of strained peaches. I’ll never forget the very first thing she said to me - she said: ‘Hey, you’ve got weasels on your face’. THAT’S when I knew it was true love!”

Dream BIG. I don’t care what’s going on behind the screen, whether it loading or unloading drivers or mice running in spinning wheels. I want something about the size of a Palm III that does everything a proficient secretary can do: correct my grammer without asking me [and do a good job], research a topic with minimum instructions, play a movie I want to see from an indexed database of all films of all time, present any book I want to read or reference, control most other electronic stuff, tell me if I left the iron on, work as a telephone, and present everything in high resolution color. I’ll be generous, it can be the size of the paperback version of “The Mote In God’s Eye.”

Really, you defined what a computer should be when you said it should be Commander Data: The Data Dream should be a smart, innovative “person in a box” that you could put in your pocket. Or at leas the traveling portion would be pocket-sized. The base unit could be as big as tower PC.

I’d settle for today’s prices and today’s technology, please, if only it will be reliable.

I’d like a computer that has for its user interface a walking, talking, miniature, interactive, holographic ( maybe), reasonably intelligent representation of a person. I personally would prefer it walk , and especially talk, like Diana Rigg did when she appeared in “The Avengers” round about 1967. Brent Spiner would be OK, but not nearly as welcome before I had my morning coffee. I could say to it “Mrs. Peel, please put the commas in the right place in that e-mail to Jerry Pournelle and oh yes, check to see if I spelled his name right”. A witty reply might be forthcoming from the interface depending on the time of day, or by my tone of voice. Wit might be the greatest programming challenge of all.

I’ve heard this concept mentioned by Nicholas Negroponte. There’s also a rather nicely detailed description of such an interface in Vernor Vinge’s novella “The Peace War”. This may sound superfluous compared to some of the other e-mail you receive, but that’s the single thing I’d like most. I’d like to be able to tell “it” to do all the things you mention in your lead in, but I’d like to tell a personality. I would especially like to tell a personality that was NOT designed by someone who has ever worn a cotton polo shirt with the word Microsoft emblazoned on it, not even for just a few days. I’ve had enough of dancing paperclips that jump up and go “boink, boink” just when you least want them to.

Intelegent web surfing i.e. Being able to give it a subject &; it will look past all the adverts and duff links for me. Also I work with spreadsheets all day which then have to be turned into charts for presentations. Desite the fact that the data is of the same type I seem to spend hours just removing a line here &; a line there ,small repetative tasks but can’t currently be automated.

However we must be careful as shown in the film Charlie &; the Chocolate Factory, when a computer was asked to predict the location of the golden tickets it replied ‘No that would be cheating’.

Yours Sincerely

One of the things that I really love about my Pilot is that, with avantgo, I have three days of local cinema listings.

How about having my assistant gadget eavesdrop on my conversations. If there’s something I can’t remember, like the name of a movie starring X, it goes out to the IMDB <http://www.imdb.com> and gives a little beep to let me know it’s found it. It’ll know what CD’s I own, so that when I’m browsing in the record store, I know what I have, and what I’d like to buy. It should be able to identify a song or piece of music from any snippet that it hears, and mark it for future purchase or download. I want it to save names, phone numbers, appointments and meeting places as they come up in conversation. I want it to automatically download maps and driving directions to every meeting place that comes up in conversation, and be able to give spoken word driving directions in the car.

I want all my clocked gadgets to set themselves automagically. I want all of my gadgets to be wired to my PC, at least for control purposes, and content transfer as appropriate.

I want all my user customizable software options to be stored in the same place, and readable by all other software packages, so that when I install Eudora, it uses all my Outlook Express rules and folders and settings, and vice versa. When I install a word processor, I want it to look in that same place to save my documents and custom dictionaries. I want to just back up that single user directory, so that when I reinstall software, all I need is to put that directory back into place, and all will be as it was.

ps: the Data Dreams link on the front page links to the View entry. It would probably be better to have it link to the brand spankin’ new Dreams page.

· The computer shall ready to use at the moment that the user switches it on - in about the same amount of time that it takes an incandescent light bulb to give light when you hit the switch.

· The computer shall be completely immune to glitches in the electricity supply.

· All main components shall be plugged into the computer from the outside, with no need to open up the case. The system shall be totally modular.

· All homes, offices, public buildings etc. shall be built with standard receptacles - just as they are today with RJ11 jacks and 110VAC outlets. Into these new receptacles shall be plugged the computers themselves - no wires or cables, imagine a rectangular sockets in every room, cubicle, airport concourse etc. The receptacles shall provide power and access to fibre networks which shall, in turn, provide access to systems as yet unknown.

What I want a computer to do is relatively simple and completely possible. I want my computer, in plain language, to tell me exactly what a given software or hardware problem is, and then tell me plainly how to fix it. To do this right would require a separate system to run the diagnostics so that no matter what goes wrong, be it with my IE5, my monitor, a hard drive crash, or a complete power failure, the diagnostic could say, "Hey, this is what's wrong, and this, you idiot, is how you repair it."

I’ve been a fan of yours for years (you probably get that all the time), but this is the first time I’ve written to you. I first started reading your column in Byte at least ten years ago, then found a few of your books. I enjoy both greatly.

What I’ve been looking for my PC to do is something that I saw on TV years ago. I believe it was in the 80’s when I first saw a Brittish or Australian science fiction show called “Star Cops”. It featured a Police Commander on the Earth’s Moon who carried a fantastic piece of computer hardware he called simply “Box”. It fit in his shirt pocket and responded to verbal commands, responded verbally, and was supposedly tied in to all manner of databases, both police and corporate. If you’ve seen it you’ll remember it. If not, I may have a copy of a few episodes on VHS tape if you’d like to see it (I think I’ll dig them up anyway; I havent looked at them in years). I don’t remember the creator of the series.

Well, thats it for now. I can’t wait to see what other “DATA Dreams” you get!

1. Voice control of all applications. MacInTalk’s “Speakable Items” are a good start, but not enough.

2. Customizable speech recognition (dictation) with canned phrases and glossary items (like those in many spelling checkers).

3. Cross-application macros at the operating system level. Right now I get by with AppleScript and QuicKeys on my Macintosh, but not all applications support AppleScript. There is nothing like this for Windows except limited tasks within the Microsoft Office suite products.

4. Work pattern recognition by an intelligent agent that knows things like my backup and file saving patterns, how often I check e-mail, when to run Norton Utilities, automatic repeated events (like weekly reports or monthly mutual fund quote updates), etc. Many of these things can be automated, but it requires tweaking preferences, options, control panel settings, special extensions or dll files, etc. It’s a lot of work.

5. Wireless high-speed connection with everything: LAN, printers, scanners, digital cameras, Internet, radio stations, TV, etc.

After working the net this afternoon, I'd settle for an Internet connection that could be maintained for longer than 5 minutes. You know like the ones you see in the movies.

Otherwise, I'd like a universal address book that individual applications could recognize. I'm tired of having to maintain mutliple listings between email addresses, business contacts, personal lists, etc. After two years, I still haven't found one. Sigh.

Dr. Pournelle: I'd love to have a computer that would respond to voice input, tactile input, Oath of Fealty-style 'telepathic' input, and in general have Data's abilities, including arms and legs, a body temperature of ca. 98 degrees, and the general appearance of, say, Seven-of-Nine or Sarah Michelle Geller, or . . .

But cybernetics like this may be why we've never encountered intelligent life (at least, not that we generally recognize) off-planet. Once a species becomes competent at computer building, maybe the members thereof are so wrapped up in the idea of [name your favorite celebrity here] as a sex partner (or alien equivalent) that they disappear inside their computers and VR gear.

Or maybe I've just described cyber-hooker. Let's keep Microsoft around just to provide the glitches necessary to keep us in contact with the physical world.

I’d really like to see a computer that could drive the car. Quite aside from getting a kick out of rolling down the road in the passenger seat, watching the people look for a non-existent driver, an intelligent car would be a major boon for safety.

Forget intelligent roads. That’s too limited a view. Not all roads carry enough traffic for embedded sensors and signals to be practical.

An intelligent car. Install a good identification system, and two things will happen: car thieves have to look for honest work (well, we can hope) and a drunk would be driven home in his own car, with no danger to himself or others. When it comes to biological malfunctions caused by alcohol—the kinds of things that really annoy cab drivers—the computer might take a dim view, but it won’t punch out the drunk or steal his wallet or leave him in a sleazy part of town.

Soccer moms wouldn’t have to chauffer all the kids. Using a cell phone while driving wouldn’t be dangerous. No one is hurt if you fall asleep at the wheel, and men wouldn’t be handicapped by obstinately failing to ask for directions.

As a beleaguered “knowledge worker,” I want my computer to provide me with the ability to interact with my boss and coworkers more effectively than I could in person. This will deny him the ability to require me to travel to work every day. The first country that gets this capability will enjoy many beneficial effects (better air quality, fewer traffic deaths, different urban forms) than it will suffer harm (collapsing commercial real estate prices). To achieve this I want:

1) A researchbot that will review the content of articles journals, index and prepare citations, grade and summarize their content for me based on parameters I specify, e.g. “Bot, go find me every article written in the last five years about drama theory in international relations that might relate to the document in folder x. Tell me in one sentence why the article deserves my attention. Exclude any articles by Professor Zenph, because he is a nitwit. Read me the results in my library in twenty minutes”

2) By the way, my Bot looks and sounds anyway I want it to. Since my wife isn’t around right now-my bot sounds like Ursula Andress, but most of the time it sounds like Derek Jacobi or the Duke.

3) By the way, my Bot is tutoring my twin boys in Latin and is smart enough not to let them cheat when they are doing their own research.

4) My Bot also helps me make decisions by gathering information and presenting it to me according to rules I define through methods I specify (e.g. “Bot, I have $10,000 to invest, find me a growth stock with low risk and high return in what is currently the best sector of the economy-present your findings to me as a) a cost-benefit assessment and b) a multiattribute decision analysis using the variables I gave you last week.”)

5) My work environment enables me to talk to people who work for my company, contractors and others, draw diagrams for others, refer to notes, and access files as a group. This environment is not scrunched onto a 17” screen, but is instead capable of completely immersing my colleagues in a different environment-sometimes we meet in a cafe in Paris, sometimes in a German castle, sometimes in a hydrogen pool on Triton. My only trips are now for pleasure, when I am deliberately seeking unmediated experience. We can even do the dreaded “breakout session” remotely.

6) I know to the dime who contributes money to my elected officials, what their affiliations are and how my elected officials have responded to the loot.

7) I need to be able to access all of this information from the Holiday Inn in Joplin, Missouri or from the rental car I drove to Joplin from Tulsa.

8) The “Justice” department and other officials have access to any of this information without court order. My Bot maintains a strict “Don’t ask. Don’t tell” policy with regards to other bots and the world at large.

I want to take my pager-sized computer with me to the pub and meet my friends there in a seamless virtual Friday-night-beer-after-work environment and talk to them and see them even if I’m on the west coast, Katie’s in New England, and Steve’s in Ohio. Maybe we can meet in my favourite place this week and be ‘in’ Steve’s hangout the next. And I want one that’s waterproof, so we can show my mom in Arizona our kayak trip - while we’re on it.

This particular dream is not limited to my own computer, but more accurately a wireless-Internet-related dream. I want the ability to condense all the worldwide legal information concerning me to a SINGLE logical set of records in ONE globally accessible database (on several mirror sites of course) maintained in private hands. It drives me nuts that for every individual I need to interact with, literally dozens of databases in multiple media may need to be referenced, both external and internal to the firm at which I work. With each third-party application that can be classified as groupware that our firm adds, the problem of inefficient management is compounded.

Access to such universal client identity databases would apply to both the client of record and third parties. Everyone other than employees of the firm administering the database and the client herself would by default be denied access, even to the point of denying verification of the existence of the client's records. The client would then specify at various levels of access via predefined rules who has what access to what information. The problem that immediately crops up is that although the client should presumably have the greatest amount of control over the content of and access to her records, it's clear that she won't be allowed complete control (just as the average joe doesn't currently have complete control over one's Experian credit records).

For such a scheme to work it seems to me that each person (both client and third-party) using such databases will need to be assigned a quantity called "trust" for want of a better word. One's trust rating would be used to automate as much as possible the degree to which one can access and/or modify personal data (their own as well as others'). A further requirement would be a global ability for anyone to communicate with the database servers 24x7 via appropriate media (PCs, PDAs, N. European-style enhanced digital phones, pushbutton telephone, courier, snail mail, subdermal nanocomputers expressed as tattoos, in person, etc.). As an aside, note that once such total availability becomes near-instantaneous, one stumbling block will have been removed from the replacement of paper check and hard currency transactions between parties in favor of true digital cash transactions.

I expect to eventually see private companies compete to provide such identity services, and that people will gladly pay for the convenience. But for goodness sakes I hope hotmail.com is not one of the first. ;-)

Big obstacles are concerns over security and privacy. It strikes me as unacceptably risky to put all one's eggs in one basket - a client could lose one's legal identity much more thoroughly than is now the case. So I want the choice (economic as well as legal) to NOT participate in such schemes, as well as the choice to participate in more than one. And of course, governments' inevitable insistence on access (both official and covert) to such databases would be a real can of worms. Witness the current debates on access to encrypted data.

And before I get flamed for promoting corporate big-brotherism, please note that on a planet with 6 billion humans, privacy is a two-way street. There is precious little privacy as things stand, and without agreement on and implementation of formal global rules, personal privacy will only erode further (e.g, your personal genome distributed on a DVD-ROM, or even worse, a ftp site), with results benefiting mainly large and/or efficient organizations who at best simply want your money.

On a sideways note, see http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/faq/faqs1.html for official news of progress on the Human Genome Project.

I keep dreaming that my computer will help me remember and organize the stuff I want remembered and organized. I am surrounded by bits of paper with names, dates, prices, tasks, and all other things that seemed important at least once. I have tried various pims, and the only one that organizes and displays tasks and schedules in a way that is helpful to me is Above and Beyond. But when I enter 'call John', it doesn't pop a list of John's and insert the phone number, or tell me the last time I talked to him, and about what, or his wife's name, or if I still owe him a memo, where I read that article I think he will be interested in,...

What are people doing with desktop power to run models these days? The Club of Rome's closing speeches claim a valid model, inadequate data. Did the Club of Rome assumptions discredit serious speculation based on models? For computer dreams I want NBER data, the processing power and interface are ahead of the data.

Excellent point. I used to run the old Meadows/Forrester Models of Doom in BASIC. The model wasn't terrible but the assumptions were: resources were a monotonically declining value, as if we are going to run out of aluminum...

Size matters, to be a REAL personal computer the computer needs to be around the size and weight of a Palm Pilot. It would always be on and available for use. A solid state unit with minimum moving parts, and enough redundancy built in to allow it to fail gracefully, and never simply die. Hardware should be self diagnosing and call for repair long before any faults become fatal.

It should be capable of replacing my current cell phone, home phone, answering machine, FAX, TV, video recorder, set top cable box, radio, camera (video and still), GPS receiver. In fact all the gadgets in my life that use electricity, with the exception of the things used in food preparation.

Naturally the screen should be high resolution, with around 1000 dpi, and full colour, with no latency so moving images do not blur. The screen should be capable of displaying in the normal mode (say 2.5" by 3.5"), then unfolding to a middle size (say 5" by 7") and then unfold again to a full size (say 10" by 14"). This action should be as simple as folding or unfolding a piece of paper.

The screen should know the lighting conditions, mode it is in, and the orientation of the display and adjust the information accordingly.If you put want to see a full page image of a document, stand the screen up, to see more of a spreadsheet lay the unit on its side.

Input would also have to be flexible. Voice recognition, naturally, and also the ability to type and mouse virtually, by having a flexible keyboard and touch sensitive pad that you can use for limited input, and wireless connection to a full size keyboard and mouse, if you need to do lot of manual entry.

Your voice and sound I/O would be via an implanted device like the one from the novel Oath of Fealty, but the box would also have a mike and stereo speakers, and a light weight headset is also an option for anyone who didn't want to have the implanted link..

The unit would have a video camera that can capture stills and movies, and as a bonus be able to track exactly where you are looking on the screen, allowing you to make some selections by just looking at the screen.

Memory would be solid state and so large as to be almost limitless (have the capacity to hold Weeks of captured video, movies, sound or almost any data you care to keep).

Networking is to be universal. A wireless broadband connection that can carry data, voice, video, anything (data is data), to anywhere in the word (and hopefully beyond it). This link will allow you to print to any printer you have access rights to, display on a larger screen in the same room, or across the world,

The universal network will allow different levels of access and be totally secure. You should be able to download a newspaper from a public kiosk, write a letter to a friend, talk to someone on the phone, watch two separate video feeds, and be linked to both your home and the office networks, all at the same time, and all without these tasks being aware of each other, all applying appropriate security.

Data should be secure, and automatically backed up both on the box and to a remote location, over the network. Older versions of documents and programs will not be overwritten, but progressively backed up and moved off to remote storage, still available in the future, but out of the way.

Because the PC is and its data so important to you (even though the data is automatically backed up to a secure place), you cannot lose it or have it stolen. If you put it down and forget where you left it you can ask it (using the headset) where it is and it will tell you. If it is lost out of range of the headset, or stolen you can access its location via the police or over the network (remember it know where it is by GPS). To preserve your privacy it will only tell you or people that you specifically authorise where it is.

To prevent unauthorised use the PC will recognise you biometrically and not allow access to anyone else (unless you allow access.

The power consumption should be so low that the unit can use body heat to recharge, it is a personal computer after all.

First, software should work, any problems that you find should be automatically reported by the system and just as automatically "healed".

If you like it the system should respond like a person to voice prompts, if you talk to it in reasonable facsimile of English it should reply in the same way. I think that the jury is still out on a virtual assistant, but some people like the paper clip.

The software, any software should adapt to the way that you work, picking up cues to work the way that you want to. Documents created in the office will be in the business form and templates. A letter to a friend should conform to a different layout, and grammatical standard.

The PC should work like a real assistant. It should learn from what you have done before, forming a way of doing things. If you tell it to send last months sales figures to Fred, it will ask you to let it know what sales figures, get Fred's full name, position, and address, and present the information using the companies standard templates. In a months time it will ask you if you want to send the sales figures to Fred.

It should quietly correct errors, no matter what you are doing, and suggest ways of doing things to help you to do learn new techniques.

You should be able to "drill down" no matter where you are and change the preferences for anything, from a spreadsheet template to the screen colour settings

You should be able to create a program by outlining what you want it to do and then view the PCs suggestions.

If you tell it to "make a web page using the pictures from the field trip last week, link them to two columns of thumbnails with a full width space under each pair, with a caption for each and allow a little room for some text I will add later" It should, and it should remember this layout for future use.

If you want to know the name of the writer of the star trek episode where the security chief was killed by the black goo, it should be able to go and find out for you. If you want to see any other episodes that he wrote, it should get them and show them.

You should be able to say "I am busy. Record my favourite shows, for the next few days, any news on the rotary rocket corporation, plus a random 5% of sport and news based on my usual preferences".

You should be able to say "I feel like a night out, check with the gang and see who is in the area, and wants to come".

The PC should be able to know who are the friends that make up "the gang", and check with their PCs and get their general location and availability ( if they have allowed you access to their computers) and present you with a list of options based on the restaurants, and other entertainment in the area based on your known preferences, the preferences of the your friends, and the availability of space at the venues.

It will help you contact your friends, by e-mail, individual phone call, or conference call (once again based on your known preferences) and you can finalise your arrangements, the PC will make bookings, arrange transport, an generally handle details.

Many years ago, Jack Kirby did a comic book series that contained a thing called a Mother Box. This was a computer of small size constructed and personalized by the person who would use it. Until true personalization is achieved, computers are a tools of a low order only.

remember past implementations, track problems all of them encountered and score their reliability over time so I could return at any point to a past life;

track all hardware ever it has ever associated with and again track and score all implementations; be able to look out on the Web for information on ANY new thing (hardware, software drivers…) and access other implementation databases to increase the chances of getting it right the first time;

use input channels beyond the obvious (keyboards and voice) such as sign language, bells and whistles, even the faint nodding of a head or the turn of an eye;

have output channeling to most devices so I do not have to carry a monitor but can use my headphones, a payphone or your extra screen;

and, have the ability to remove parts of bloatware I will never use to increase its own speed and accuracy.

Hello

My ability to recall names of people I have previously met is atrocious. The thing I would like my whiz bang new Data to do is to is optically recognize and whisper in my ear the names of people I interact with. It should also upon request provide additional information (past projects, family) about the person. It needs to do all of this quietly and intelligently in the background with out flooding me with babble. Of course, It needs to be small and unobtrusive. Optics and audio should be built in to my glasses with processing and storage in my watch. If it can provide other memory enhancement services that is all the better.

to be able collect &; index, clippings without/hassling with creating new HTML documents, or add them to existing pages easier.

I’d like the visual rendering to be sufficiently fast and real that the VR craze of years ago were truly possible, and to the point that an expert would have difficulty telling the difference between VR and true reality, yet there be an easy and honest way to retain your sanity when you ask “Is this Real?”

I’d like the computer to organize my data so I don’t have to. Even in these days of long file names, I’d like to be able for the machine to recall what I want instantly and without error, or advise me where I stored it archivally. If there is ambiguity, I’d like the list of my choices to readily show me the key items that differentiate the ambiguities.

My computer should talk to me in a human (or otherwise if I choose) voice, and for me to be able to converse with it and give at least simple unambiguous commands that don’t hose my machine. “Delete Drive C” shouldn’t be a phrase that trashes my world. Never, ever.

I’d like the machine to be software-wise self-healing. We’re so close yet so far even now. If something is wrong, it should ideally fix it, or at least tell me where to go on the ‘net to get the fix.

Archive backups should be something I can set up once, and never worry about again. (Perhaps an online store that puts it all into a bank vault)

The PC should be smart enough to recognize a virus-like behavior and issue the warning upon detection (Take Melissa virus—that puppy is sooooo flinkin’ obviously a virus! An app that sends text to another location is one thing, an app that sends itself (or mutation) is another!) Ideally, it should ask what to do if I tell it to behave this way, and otherwise tell me and unless I intervene, schedule it for deletion. No, this isn’t easy. But I’m getting sick of some wacko in Tooleyville causing millions of dollars of damage and not getting caught. Catching the wacko is too late. I want my box hardened.

The PC should have an option for a neural jack or helmet; Sure, I’m not going to trust it for decades—MS BrainMouse? Not on your life! Yet Oath of Fealty is right—being jacked in would be worth the surgery if it were as safe as eye surgery is today.

The PC should be a better butler and valet. It can be, and should be tied closely to home automation, track my grocery level, order more food when I’m do (or at least tell me to do it/authorize the shopping list) It should wake me in the morning based on my REM patterns, not the fact that I set the alarm for 6AM. It should know my viewing habits on TV and store my favorites digitally.

It should be a buddy for me, and a protective mentor for children. If the AI is ever smart enough to learn from my habits, this seems logical—be my ally when playing games, an information source that appropriately filters data my child shouldn’t see yet, but tell the child that daddy says no, not without him present.

It should monitor my health. We’re on the verge of this today. If I’m a heart risk candidate, a wee bit of telemetry could save my life when I’m not able to do so.

The damned thing shouldn’t crash when fed bad applications or data. Worst case, it should say to me “This application is behaving irregularly. Should I terminate it?” and recover gracefully and without fail, not teach me to hate the color blue.

Applications should be intelligent also. If I want to redesign my kitchen, I shouldn’t have to be an architect to do it. Again, we’re close, but missing the mark.

If I want to do something out of the ordinary for me, the computer should be able to ‘rent’ an application until the task is finished, then release the rental back to a pool of apps on the net. The kitchen analogy again—it’s something I’m likely to do once a decade, if even that often. Further, the install should be totally invisible to the user, and totally clean when uninstalling. I shop for the app I want, use it, and send it along to the next customer. If I use the app often enough, I get a deal on buying it outright.

IP6, the new TCP/IP address scheme would permit every person on the planet, plus every square meter to have a unique address space. That means that potentially, every module of my PC/Home System could be addressed, and know that its sibling components have addresses and communicate locally without configuration being rocket science. Heck, NIC’s already have unique ID’s. The downside here is privacy. The upside is the potential for zero theft due to ID tracking of equipment. Surely there’s a happy medium in there somewhere.

I want it to be able to handle all my finances electronically and in great detail, yet not need an accounting degree to use it well. Quicken is a start, but it’s just that—a start.

Ditto for my communications and information needs—I want intelligent filtration. Not just information I don’t find interesting, but ads and spam. Whatever happened to only seeing ads in a newspaper? If I don’t want to see the ads right now, let the PC queue them up and let it slowly figure out my buying habits, then suggest purchases when I ask if it knows of anything I might wish to buy today.

I want my PC to allow me to get information in a way that rewards the info gatherer at least as well as the paper systems of today. It’s far, far too easy to rip content authors off these days. (speaking of which, I STRONGLY suggest you check out Fatbrain.com—they may have what we need here, and when was the last time you got a 50% royalty??)

Not require a CS or EE degree to upgrade. If a PC ‘card’ were actually a modular cube with appropriate jacks, the module could be hardened against static, have connectors for power, cooling and I/O, etc. If I swap a module, it shouldn’t require a reboot, and actually be hot-swappable so my grandma can do it when she wants an upgrade for her TV/VCR module.

My PC shouldn’t bombard me with information overload. It should shut up when I tell it to.

It shouldn’t become a crutch for either me or young children. It isn’t a babysitter, and it isn’t a nanny. It’s an assistant, no more, no less. Kids need people! But it could easily be an Aristotelean tutor.

It shouldn’t dominate my life. I’d rather see a bunch of ubiquitous toaster devices than one huge monster that oversees everything.

It shouldn’t become obsolete every 2 years. Look hard at that modular design—if the backplane/box needs an upgrade, it shouldn’t be any more expensive than a coffee table, and the modules should be easy enough to swap to the new system, just like stereo components today, only easier. The stereo industry could decide on standard interfaces, why can’t the computer industry? USB is soooo close. It pains me that most Mac components can never fit into a PC and vice versa.

It shouldn’t mean we further burden down the existing power infrastructure. Sure, my PC only sucks down 3 lightbulb’s worth, but it can just as easily turn out 3 lights I’m not using, or store parasitic power from my roof/heat pump/whatever. Those 3 lightbulbs add up, and will continue to do so until we have power farms in orbit.

Enough for now. Personally, I view the computer as the greatest invention of this century. We’ve yet to exploit all of its powers, and many of our attempts are just stumbling around, hoping we bumped into the right answer.

Hi Jerry,

I'm like my computer to talk to me -- specifically, I'm interested in
voice-out, as opposed to voice-in, which IBM and everybody else seems so
obsessed about. Naturally the two go together. In order to talk to its
user, the computer must have input, and the most natural form would be
voice input of basic commands. Voice-out does not need a full-featured,
complex dictation system, however.

Voice-out will make it possible for everyone to give their computers
unique personalities. This would be done through a set of voice-out
styles -- formal, casual, friendly, romantic, tough-guy, poetic, and so
on. It will also become possible to chose a male or female gender for
the computer, and even a celebrity voice such as John Wayne or Charles
Bronson.

For the life of me, Jerry, I don't see why we haven't got this already.
As far as I can see, it would require only a cleverly chosen set of
voice recordings that would play selectively under specific
circumstances. No speech-generator engine.

Nobody I've raised this subject with seems to "get" it. Maybe the bad
experience Chrysler had a decade or two back with talking cars ("Your
door is ajar, your door is ajar, your door is ajar...") scared software
developers away from this area. The thing that bugs me is that it would
be easily possible to create this talking shell for Windows 98 today,
with today's technology. It would be hugely popular, and hugely
lucrative, if correctly designed.

Just a computer that answers you when you tell it something, or tells
you what it's doing while it's doing it. In a friendly, personable way.
What could be simpler?

Don Tyson

A personal data assistant and augmenter that is part of my nervous system (tied into the 'main bus' spinal cord?) full control via thought [[think:<ai><reference><...>]]

Can play movies full video and sound, music at work (output to five senses) reference, entertainment, work storage (I am a remodeler and having the specs on call or code manuals would be a godsend...and not having to go down the ladder to look at them would be better) intercepts phone/email for me and determines whether it is important enough for immediate attention ["your wife is calling"]

keeps track of dates, times, etc - realtime comm. with anyone anywhere so equipped can monitor status of my body and alert me to low glucose levels, etc, possibly correct

an AI friendly enough to converse with of course, tied into my cabin so it can start supper, etc...something like this would require lots of changes in the ways appliances are built!

*** can do all my non-inventive work (bookkeeping, etc and present it for review (thank you, Jeeves) this would be best!!

[[wish list: sequel to "The Gripping Hand"; say, an exterior threat to combined Motie/Human Empire?--more Renner!]] wondering if U and LN would open Mote universe to short stories or other fic-lotsa time here in N. MN in winter,heehee

Basic Requirements Switch on fast (if not faster). Work constantly and fast. No crashes, hangs, pauses, or other delays. Switch off instantly, or be so low power it never turns off.

Other Bits I don't care if I talk or type, preferably not a mouse AND a keyboard. A single device to interact with is much better. It needs a continuous FAST connection to the net, my office network, my home system. It needs to be light, run on batteries for months, and FAST. It needs to be smart enough to know when you are talking to a person, in the room or on the phone, and when you are dictating or talking to it. Oh, did I mention it needs to be fast?

I'm a computing professional and I'm sick, sick, sick of having really fast hardware stumbling and bumbling along, dragging it's massive great operating system and apps behind it.

My desire is simple, and can readily be achieved: I want my computer to give me the information I want, and nominate that I want. I do not have programming skills, and do not believe I should have to develop them.

Instance of the bad stuff: in Internet Explorer 5, when I login to my e-mail service, the dropdown menu that appears as I begin typing my handle, starts with a mistype I made about eight months back. Other mistypes appear below. I feel I should be able to delete these and get only the one I want. Similarly, if I start to key in www.nytimes.com to look at the newspaper, "http://www. nytimes.com/library/national/100399food-fraud.html" and a vast heap of URLs of individual stories appear, rather than "www.nytimes.com", my unfailing first resort to the site. Bloody irritating and, I suspect, entirely unnecessary.

Instance of the good stuff: go to www.google.com, type "Pournelle", click the "I'm feeling lucky" button, get straight into Chaos Manor.

Another instance: go to the Norwegian search engine www.alltheweb.com, type in "Pournelle" and hit Enter. The response is of most-likely sources at top of list. (Exactly IE5's reverse.)

.... ps, psychologist: fascinating three-part series on Salon last week for which "hidden persuaders" will provide adequate search, mentions that Microsoft is undertaking new types of research because it has twigged that it doesn't know what its customers want. A somewhat late discovery.

Paul Kunino Lynch 4/36-38 Bayswater Road Kings Cross Australia 2011 02-9368 0809 +612 9368 0809 ... phone &; fax

I've had this dream for half a decade, so it is looking a little more possible and old hat now, but here it goes. I want my computer to be about the size of a button on my jacket. I can talk to it, and it can talk to me. It is connected. Whatever information I need, it will find. It will either talk to me, or transmit it to the nearest available screen or printer, wherever I am. The screens are not limited to the 15" to 21" options we have at the moment. It will interact with limitless resources on the internet, one of which is my base unit somewhere which has all of my personal resources available. I have voice control of all the activities that I currently do with keyboard/mouse control.

I read a description of a small blimp with motors, microphone, video, and speakers. You could log on to the blimp over the internet and navigate it about a building, seeing what it sees and talking to any people it encounters. I loved the idea. I want one in every location I might want to see. Art galleries, museums, places of wonder. They might need an override control on the speakers and motors at a musical event so that the promoters can ensure that I don't inadvertently interrupt the performance.

I'm also a fan of strategy games, and I want my computer to be able to manage more units a bit faster than what they do now, over a wider range of maps. The ideal game will have a mix of Command and Conquer's feel and strategy, Starcraft's fun and playability, Total Annihilation's 3D terrain and need for a mix of units, etc.

why stick to clumsy, clunky computers!? I don't want to use an external, artificially complicated device when I could have something much better: brain enhancements! Let's face it, that's what we're ultimately trying to do here. Reading through people's comments I see stuff like "remind me of my appointments, keep a record of who this person is with backgrounds, better research capabilities", etc. - the list goes on. All of this is stuff that _I_ should personally be able to do without the help of external gadgets. Unfortunately I can't, so I get an upgrade. Why not? Need to learn a new language, plug in that spanish module, want to build a better mousetrap, get an Edison V7.1, etc. That way I can do everything I need to, the tasks will seem easy (because they're being done by the add-ons but will seem as though you're doing them yourself) and I get the satisfying feeling of having accomplished it myself - so to speak - on top of it all! Let's not stick to the clunky interfaces and tools we've had to build so far, let's have some REAL vision and go for the whole pie rather than just a little slice of it. I want my "brain within a brain".

OK, so all of this is a ways in the future, but with the rapidity of how things are developing - I have studied CS and work in the computer industry today, yet I'm STILL constantly amazed at how fast the Internet has grown - who knows how long (short?) it will take?

I've had that sort of thing in my science fiction stories from time to time. I like it.