Today's Computers Are Broken, Let's Figure Out What's Next

I’m sitting here in January, looking at this year’s haul from CES and it’s the same parade of new products adorned with the same adjectives I’ve seen for the last 20 years—faster, bigger, smaller, thinner, lighter, shinier, smarter, better. The numbers always get better and the bars always get bigger, but nothing I’ve seen out of CES is going to solve the actual problem we’re all facing: time.

The modern computer has become a time vampire. I’m not just talking about infinitely scrolling videos on TikTok or endless games of Fortnite. I’m talking about almost every task that’s vital to modern life, from checking email to paying bills to getting emergency information to finding a doctor to buying a pair of shoes. Turning our attention and time into money has made trillions of dollars for a handful of corporations over the last 20 years, but as user growth has slowed the only way to keep revenues growing (and shareholders happy) is to steal an ever-increasing amount of our time.

For most of the last twenty years, being good at computers (and later smartphones) was a kind of superpower. You had access to secret information that offline folks didn’t know. Everything from travel to home goods to takeout was cheaper or easier than it was for people who still used their phones to talk to actual humans. We’ve all gotten addicted to skipping the line.

I read constantly and love saving a buck, so at the dawn of the Amazon Age, I loved buying books online. The books I bought were the same, whether I clicked a link in a browser or drove across town to Barnes & Noble, but saving 40 minutes in the car and a few bucks on the price tag made me feel like I was getting away with something.

Tasks that are more complicated or have more dependencies in a traditional context are even more complicated online. Buying groceries online makes meal planning infinitely more complex and has, at least in my house, dramatically increased the amount of food waste we create. An out-of-stock ingredient is much easier to adjust for if you’re pushing your cart through a brick-and-mortar grocery—you see that the ingredient is missing and adjust your meal plan on-the-fly. When you’re shopping online, you may not find out that your ingredient was unavailable until your groceries arrive, and then you’ve already purchased the other stuff you needed to make the meal. At that point, you have to either run into your local grocery anyway, make a clutch adjustment, or give up and grab takeout.

It turns out, Amazon making book buying easier than the brick and mortar experience was a bad signal. Most of the things we use computers for are more complicated than buying a book. They’re even more complicated than buying groceries. And we’ve reached the point where it’s not in any of the big technology companies best interests to make those tasks easier.

We have to realize that the time for skipping lines has passed.

So what’s next? We’re overdue for another huge shift in computing, and I don’t think this one is going to come from any of the existing technology companies. They’re too big, too ossified, and too entrenched in their existing revenue streams. All of their business models are locked into the attention economy, which is what’s pushing users everywhere over the edge today.

I don’t think the next revolution will be powered by AI. If anything, current generative models are accelerators that are just making the problem worse. Cheap, VC-subsidized content creation is just increase the cognitive load we all feel every time we use the Internet. Is that picture real? Is that AI summary accurate or the endpoint in a Markov chain of lies? Is that really my mom calling me or just another hyper-targeted scam?

I don’t think there’s a monolithic solution to this problem—I think we’re going to see lots of people tackling individual components—information, shopping, communication, etc. They’ll find ways to save people’s time and reduce their cognitive load. And those solutions will spread, just like every good idea has spread on the Internet for the last 40 years: folks will come up with novel solutions and apply them to their areas of expertise, then the solutions will spread to other teams working on similar problems in other areas.

And when they build it, people will come.

I’ve lived through the birth of the Internet and wrote about a bunch of it, from the early pre-commercial days to the modern hyper-monetized smartphone era. I know that there’s a better way, and I’m ready for what’s next. Are you?

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