Technical Enlightenment

There is a lot of talk going on at the moment about Siri. What it does, what it doesn’t do. I’d prefer to look at what it could become. I think it has the potential to turn into something game changing. I think it’s the beginning of the end or the keyboard and mouse.

Right now, Siri only works on the iPhone 4S and only with a few built in apps. However, it’s only been out a week and rumour has it that the Siri development team is the largest within apple. So we know more will be coming, we also know that apple take the best features of MacOS and IOS and cross pollinate them.

So when would this happen? It could be the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. Given that MacOS X (ten) has run out of big cat names and finished with Lion, I think it’s safe to say the next move will move beyond MacOS 10.x. So the question is, how do you take MacOS 10 and turn it up to 11? To me, the answer is Siri.

Apple loves to be the first to obsolete technology and people have been asking for touch screen iMacs for years now. However Steve Jobs has said (check out 1:57) that touch screens don’t work on vertical surfaces and I think he’s right. You can’t type an essay or even an email at that angle.

But what if you are dictating? And what if you iMac is wall mounted? What if it’s hooked into your appleTV, so it can hear you in your living room as well as your study? To me, that is how you take MacOS and turn it up to 11. Steve job once said “Just give me Star Trek.” It was a wise crack, but its through jest where some people are more willing to tell you what they think.

There are huge challenges from taking something that works with a few apps on a phone and giving it the power to operate an iMac. If apple stick to their usual release cycle, they have about 18 months to get it done. That probably a tall order. So instead, like the phone, this will start simple, an email, some music on iTunes, a document in pages.

With time though, Siri could be running a lot more for us.

So the question becomes, is that a good thing?

Like so many tools, this will depend on how we use it. If we stop talking to people and only have out PDA talk to your PDA, then this is going to leave us feeling very alone in the world. If instead, we use it to free up our time to spend it with friends and family, for example, by dictating emails while we’re stuck in traffic, then it could do a lot of good for us. The danger is, of course, is whenever we find a way to free up time, someone else will use that time to work and they’ll be competing with you for that next promotion. That’s why technology won’t give us the answers, only the tools…

Why are any of us here? And why can’t we all just get along?

I‘m not convinced we will find the answers in technology, but I do think technology provides us tools to find the answers for ourselves. In this blog I’ll be exploring new technology and giving my view on how it makes the world a better (or worse) place.

See, I have always enjoyed travelling. I’ve always been so pleased to find wonderful people in every corner of the world I’ve found myself. So much so, I’ve recently started hosting couch surfers, through couchsurfing.org. This has expanded the number of people I’ve come into contact with and strengthened  my view that the place of our birth and where we are raised, does not dictate who we can and can’t get along with.

We are constantly fed messages and images to the contrary. News stories about what a dangerous world it is out there, how those people aren’t like our people. They keep us in our homes and they keep us content with our lot. I see technology giving us the tools we need to escape these messages, but they are tools we have to use.

Sadly not everyone we encounter in life is cool. There are some people out there who selfishly think that they can do their own thing, regardless of the consequences to others. They attack people with different points of view, or send unwelcome messages or images. By bringing more people together, we also expose ourselves to that minority and give them a great audience for their attacks. I believe in free speech, but not in the freedom to attack others and attacks can be non-physical, they can be verbal.

So the technology isn’t finished yet. We don’t yet have a way or consensus on how to deal with these issues. That’s OK, we all have the power to make changes, we can develop it over time and develop ourselves right along with it. It will be an adventure!

Join me 🙂