All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

Making Your Computer Into a Parallel You

I have previously introduced my concept of gramlets which is a whole bunch of single function programs that do one thing only. They are standalone programs of a tiny size, and can be invoked to operate on anything and do what they do. One example is the Addition Gramlet For Integers that will add any integers given to it as parameters and return the sum. This is but a trivial example.

Where gramlets will come to shine, is in the evolution of the personal computer. Personal computers have come a long way, and soon your phone will be your personal computer. Or it might be in the fabric of your jacket, or stuck in your ear -- it doesn't matter. The personal computer will continue to evolve.

It will become smaller and smaller, and can even off-load large processing tasks to the cloud. Douglas Adams may not have been far off the mark, when he said in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the Earth was one huge computer.

The operating system for the personal computer must evolve as well. Gone will be the days of the dumb desktop. Your personal computer will be a learning machine that will learn all about you, anticipate your needs and handle most of the digital aspects of your life autonomously.

To become a parallel you, the operating system of the personal computer will have to ditch the ancient Microsoft paradigm and turn into a massively parallel system, just like the human brain.

Input will be fed into your personal computer via any means (web, data entry by scanner, camera etc) and the computer will take care of it. The input will be fed into all of the gramlets. They will fire if they recognize that the data is meant for them and process it.

For example, an image is fed in. The word processor and speech processor gramlet ignore it. The Filing Gramlet puts it away with the rest of the pictures, but first it passes it to the ident unit which analyses the picture to see if it is a picture of you, friends, family or whatever. Then the image is passed to the ImageQualityGramlet which adjusts the white balance, removes the red eye and passes it back for filing in the appropriate place. In the process, every Gramlet saw this input, and if the threshold was met, the gramlet recognized the data and did its job on it.

A parallel system of gramlets that learn by watching you will be the hallmark of the new personal computer operating system.

Anyone dealing with you will not be able to tell if it is really you, or the parallel you embedded in your personal computer. This will be like the graphic at the top of this post. Are the lines parallel or not? The answer will surprise you.


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