Because the future has just started
Sometimes you have technical breakthroughs. And sometimes you have conceptual breakthroughs.
Today I had a conceptual breakthrough. I realized that an important research concept had been staring me in the face for months, waiting for me to stare back.
The good news is that now I know what direction to go. The bad news is that now I’ve got lots of work to do.
Or maybe that’s also good news.
Today at a conference at NYU I learned all about the Oura ring, that $350 health-monitoring device you wear on your finger. For example, one colleague told me that it can continually monitor your heart rate, body temperature, blood oxygen level and breathing rate. It even has a linear accelerometer.
Another colleague told me that it can also be used for family planning. When I asked her how, she explained that it can track your menstrual cycle.
I told her that you could also use a VR headset for family planning. “Why can a VR headset do that?” she asked.
“Because,” I replied, “it gives you a headache.”
Today I was in a discussion with someone who designs those user interfaces that you see on the Web. When you need to navigate somewhere on the web page of your bank or your airline or your doctor, there are teams of people who figure out how to make that process as unconfusing as possible.
As for me, I gave up trying to figure those things out as soon as I could simply ask Google Gemini. I just ask, in plain English, how to get to, say, the refunds option, or the cancel appointments option, and Gemini gives me clear step-by-step instructions how to traverse the tree of menu options.
It doesn’t take much foresight to realize that this phase of things is very temporary. Within another few years, we will all be vibe coding those nested menus.
Underneath there will still be a branching tree of menu choices, but we will never see it, because our AI bot will be clicking through those menus for us.
Navigating those web options will then become a lost art. I suspect it is an art that very few people will miss.
On my MacBook I have Google Docs. I also have Zoom.
I use both of these programs pretty much every day, as well as manyother useful pieces of software.
They co-exist with one another in a kind of uneasy truce, as though they are shouting at each other across a wide ravine.
I cannot embed my Zoom window into a Google document, and I cannot automatically upate the contents a Google Doc from the text in my Zoom chat window, or vice versa.
Both Zoom an Google Docs have facilities for creating and inserting sketches and diagrams, but there is no way to go from one to the other.
And neither Zoom nor Google Docs can interact with my 3D modeler in any meaningful way, let alone a presentation tool from another company such as Apple Keynote or Microsoft PowerPoint.
Why can’t all my apps play nice with one another? Do they really all need to be locked within their respective separate islands?
Or is this just the price we must pay for internet software that comes from large warring corporations?
A new month arrives
Fresh with possibility
And fresh with danger