“At I/O 2019, onstage at the Shoreline Auditorium in Mountain View, California, Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of devices and services, laid out a new vision for the future of computing. ‘In the mobile era, smartphones changed the world,’ he said. ‘It’s super useful to have a powerful computer wherever you are.’ But he described an even more ambitious world beyond that, where your computer wasn’t a thing in your pocket at all. It was all around you. It was everything. ‘Your devices work together with services and AI, so help is anywhere you want it, and it’s fluid. The technology just fades into the background when you don’t need it. So the devices aren’t the center of the system — you are.’ He called the idea ‘ambient computing,’ nodding to a concept that has floated around Amazon, Apple, and other companies over the last few years.”
“One easy way to interpret ambient computing is around voice assistants and robots. Put Google Assistant in everything, yell at your appliances, done and done. But that’s only the very beginning of the idea. The ambient computer Google imagines is more like a guardian angel or a super-sentient Star Wars robot. It’s an engine that understands you completely and follows you around, churning through and solving for all the stuff in your life. The small (when’s my next appointment?) and the big (help me plan my wedding) and the mundane (turn the lights off) and the life-changing (am I having a heart attack?). The wheres and whens and hows don’t matter, only the whats and whys. The ambient computer isn’t a gadget — it’s almost a being; it’s the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts whole that comes out of a million perfectly-connected things.”