Add brains to the OS
4,639 veiws and now 152 posts this is a great thread and its amazing what people would like to see in 10.6 but does anyone have something fresh and original, something truly "insanely great".
Hmm, how about intelligence?
The ultimate end goal here is give the enough intelligence that we can interact with our computers the same as we do with other people (well, some of us, at least
), where you can just talk to your computer and it will understand you semantically (in any language you speak). This won't entirely get rid of keyboards because not everyone wants to dictate to a computer all day long, but in many cases it would eliminate a huge amount of manual work. "Computer, please take this data, perform the appropriate statistical analysis and tell me if I discovered something significant."
Such technology goes way beyond 10.6 and even OS XI (11).
But for the near future, here's an idea to get started...
Right now, the operating system and all the apps just execute the same rote code. First, I'd like to see an OS that monitors what we do as we use our computers and take actions on our behalf.
For one example, when I download a file, it gets put into the downloads folder that ultimately just ends up getting cluttered.
Today we are left to solve the clutter only by relatively manual means, by using Spotlight, Smart Folder and perhaps programs like
ShoveBox and
Hazel.
I think the next step is to automate the process by adding intelligence to the OS.
One possibility is a keyword prioritization engine that in some ways is like the
page ranking in Google, sort of like a Spotlight on Steroids, if you will. The OS would implement a neural net algorithm to learn which keywords are important to us and then examine downloaded material to organize stuff for us automatically. It can create folders (normal folders) and move what's downloaded to these places (and the Downloads folders becomes a smart folder, which contains a list of everything we ever downloaded--and when they were downloaded [I believe that would be new attribute for the file system[). Images downloaded from a web page could be organized according the keywords on this page. Eventually such an engine could be implemented with very sophisticated to intelligence to examine the actual image.
Keyword prioritization could be very useful elsewhere. If I get an email telling me there is smoke in the building I'm in, it will stop everything and literally yell at me to get out.
This is just one aspect of intelligence. There are plenty of others and it extends to applications as well. For example, when I work on images in Canvas and keep the original in Canvas format, I very often export the final product as a jpeg. A smart OS would see that I'm doing this and then do it for me automatically.
When I print a long manual of some kind, I often print 4-up to save paper and make it more compact to handle. A smart OS would examine the PDF document, determine it's long and automatically configure the printer to print 4-up.
When I put a blank DVD in one drive a full one in another, it will guess that I probably want to copy one to the other and offer to do that. I shouldn't have to sit there and configure the brainless UI in Toast every time.
Incidentally, the ultimate OS that has the intelligence that I described at the top no longer requires programming once it's "completed" The neural net essentially is working like our brains and rewriting its own code. A problem with that is will effectively put software programmers out of their own jobs.
