PC users drowning in information, Microsoft official says
The company’s billionaire chairman, Bill Gates, visits Washington this week to demonstrate for lawmakers and others some cutting-edge gadgets — for predicting traffic jams, for example, or turning countertops into full-blown computers.
Gates’ top researcher, Richard F. Rashid, told The Associated Press in an interview that technology in some ways is outpacing people’s ability to use it meaningfully. He described button-sized computers of the future that could be worn on a shirt and equipped with cameras and other sensors to record all a person’s movements, activities and conversations.
But experts are struggling with ways to store the vast amounts of information generated over a person’s lifetime and still permit them to retrieve important details later, said Rashid, who manages about 700 researchers at five labs from Beijing to San Francisco. And he acknowledged troubling privacy concerns.
Rashid said researchers are automatically recording hidden details associated with a piece of information, such as the geographic coordinates where a digital photo is taken, that can be used later to help retrieve it. A family could call up vacation photos by typing the name of the state where they went camping.
Prototypes of life-recording gadgets already are used by patients with some types of memory-loss ailments, who frequently benefit from keeping detailed logs of their activities, Rashid said. He also said police departments, which use dashboard cameras to record traffic stops, are interested in using shirt-pocket recording devices to protect and monitor cops on the beat.
Rashid said some things won’t change. He predicted computers will use traditional keyboards even 10 years in the future, despite enormous investments by Microsoft and others in handwriting software and speech-recognition tools to let users dictate to their computers.
“In English, at least, it’s faster to type than it is to talk,” Rashid said. “We’re not moving to a world where those things go away.”
Microsoft is also asking Washington for help. Rashid said he was meeting with lawmakers and others this week to press for education improvements, more research spending by government and relaxed immigration rules to let companies hire more foreign employees.
Rashid said he expects a 30 percent decline in computer science graduates from U.S. schools within two years, citing surveys showing a 60 percent drop in interest in the subject among incoming freshmen.
“I’m really worried. We already have jobs we can’t fill,” Rashid said. “I don’t know where we’re going to find people in this country to hire.”