The Implications for Work

A growing number of professionals bothered by the hassle and inconvenience of commuting to the city and work are opting to work at home. This has been made possible largely by the development of personal computers, since the facilities of the office can be replicated at home. Communication with co-workers can be maintained via telephone and occasional office visits. TABLET has the possibility of accelerating this trend and pushing it in a new direction.

The insight is that with a truly portable computational and communication tool, we are not restricted to working in the office or at home. We can work anywhere. TABLET will provide access to anything we are used to having at the office, so there is no reason not to work somewhere else. On a sunny day we can take our work to a park, and not fear being out of touch for an important message. The distinction between work and vacation will blur. Perhaps the biggest drawback of work-at-home, however, is the loss of social contact with co-workers. But now we can take our work to where people are, instead of moving people to where the work is.

Video conferencing will be vital if people are to communicate effectively from afar. The CCD camera, video compression processor, and cellular link make this a reality almost anywhere. Today's video conferencing requires a studio and a heavy investment. We can take our conference to where the work is actually being done.

Carrying an expensive computer is unnerving for many people for fear of breakage or theft. Our design is simple and robust enough to survive a healthy jolt. The threat of theft will be eliminated since each computer will have a unique identification number. We can call up the computer after it has been stolen and use the GPS receiver to let us how exactly where it is. Try and fence merchandise this hot! To protect personal information, it is reasonable to take handprints with the touchscreen for identification.

Perhaps even more important than physical security is data security. A great deal of personal information will be stored on these machines, and communicated by infrared and cellular telephone. To safeguard this, encryption and digital signatures will be used with all data transfer. By 2000, the general public will be familiar enough with the notion of digital signatures to trust them more than physical signatures. This will be necessary because of the ability of ray traced computer graphics to simulate any desired scene or image. The time is almost here when photographs will no longer be admissible as evidence in a court of law because they will be so easily and successfully faked.

By 2000, the marriage of computer and science will be complete. Algebra, calculus, and all aspects of mathematical calculation will routinely be done by computer, just as all arithmetic has now been relegated to calculators. Scientific journal articles will have live equations built in, so they can be checked automatically by the reader.

In the past, there were two basic approaches to science: doing experiments where one measures how a system behaves, or doing theory where one works out how a system should behave. Computers make possible another approach to science: computer experimentation, which will become the dominant method for investigating many kinds of systems. One implements an algorithm which simulates a physical system and then finds out what happens by watching the program run. There are many kinds of systems for which this approach is not only convenient, but fundamentally necessary [17]. Research in physics, biology, economics and other areas is already being directed by models inspired by digital computers. Our computer will not be big enough to predict the weather, but will be able to simulate the results of any college physics experiment. There will be very few scientists in 2000 who do not spend the majority of their time in front of a computer.

The notion of programming will change substantially. Programs in low level languages like C will start dying out like dinosaurs. Filling their ecological niche will be scripts for high-level interpretative systems. These programs will not be created by entering a sequence of lines of code, but rather by linking together operations using a graphical representation of the program's function. At the simplest level, a program will be just ``replaying'' a sequence of commands to a high level system. With these systems, fewer people will call themselves programmers since a wide class of people will be able to perform programming tasks.

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