My Curious Life

I am constantly amazed at the creative, intelligent and inspirational people in the world, a number of whom blog regularly and share their wisdom with those who are willing to accept it. The trouble is, I don’t have time anymore to seek and find these brilliant minds amongst the noise. My newsfeeds have increased to the point that Bloglines is now a creaking, shifting behemoth that I expect at any time to collapse under its own weight and smother me with information.

Computers have, over the past few decades, been primarily an empowering force, enabling us to produce faster and more efficiently, automate repetitive tasks, and generate more connections than ever before. This explosion of communication, knowledge, creativity and production has now reached a point where it’s no longer pleasurable, but overwhelming. The limiting factor seems to be our ability as human beings to filter and process this information.

Joshua Porter made a fantastic post yesterday that expanded upon his post the previous week, discussing circles of relationships and how each circle has a special significance to us as individuals. His follow-up post includes Ben Shneiderman’s original circles of relationships diagram, as well as a fantastic variation provided by Alex Mather and a beautifully dynamic Flash relationship example by Sarah Cooper. All of these examples try to categorize and map our trust relationships with others, but Sarah’s seems to document it best by showing how it changes with context.

Several years ago a brilliant friend of mine (non-blogger Dean Sanvitale) helped brainstorm an idea that I’d had for what would truly be a personal digital assistant. This PDA would take advantage of the gains we’ve made in adaptive computer intelligence, raw processing power, and wireless communication protocols. More like a traditional secretary (nee Administrative Assistant) than a portable electronic device, this trusted advisor would know everything it needed about me to intelligently administrate my day. It seems to me that we are on the verge of seeing this technology come to maturity at any time. My calendar is now digital, my contacts are digital, most of my interests and tasks are now stored digitally, and with the Facebook announcement, even rudimentary relationships are digital.

This personal assistant would know, for example, that a friend calling during my 10am staff meeting should be routed to voicemail but marked as a higher priority than the solicitor’s call from a few minutes before (or perhaps even know to delete the voicemail from the solicitor unless I say otherwise). This same assistant would know that I am intrigued by topics on interaction design and might cull the many blog postings on the internet into a collection for me to review at my leisure, perhaps even highlighting those that are from individuals whom I either email or comment on frequently.

In essence, this intelligent assistant would, like its human counterpart, know with whom I interact and in what capacity, what type of priority certain types of information should have based upon my past needs and feedback, and would even be able to handle some administrative tasks without my direct intervention, such as scheduling those necessary, but often time-consuming meetings. Place this assistant at the heart of my home and it could do even more, like inform me of incoming messages or other information as I’m watching a television program, perhaps pausing the program while I decide what to do with the new info. By being familiar with me, my preferences and my contact points, my digital assistant would know when and where to reach me when the time was right.

All of this technology exists now, and the company that first brings these things together into a cohesive system will have the chance to revolutionize the way we interact with the flood of information around us. That’s what I’d call “smart” technology.