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Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life. A lot of the data needed to make good decisions are unreliable or nonexistent. And that’s a problem.

contextual computing

Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses.

These merely scratch the surface. The adoption of contextual computing—combinations of hardware, software, networks, and services that use deep understanding of the user to create tailored, relevant actions that the user can take—is contingent on the spread of new platforms.

It’s interesting because it’s always with the user and because it’s equipped with sensors.

It’s a cultural moment that’s not dissimilar to the way in which graphical, and then networked computing, were introduced in conceptual and technical forms 10 years before reaching commercial success.

identified four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal.

There are legitimate ethical concerns about each of these graphs. They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation.

In an ideal contextual computing state, this graph would be complete—so gentle nudges by software and services can bring together two people who are strangers but who could get along brilliantly and are in the same place at the same time.

Given that psychology still struggles to explain exactly how our personal identities function, it’s not surprising that documenting such information in a computable form is slow to emerge.

A more successful example is Evernote, which has built a large business based on making it incredibly easy and secure to document both recently consumed information and your innermost thoughts.

It cannot yet tackle the way your curiosity might lead you to new directions. And it could never effectively recommend a restaurant or a vacation spot based on what it knows you read.

As Bill Gates astutely pointed out, "There’s a tendency to overestimate how much things will change in two years and underestimate how much change will occur over 10 years."

By combining a task with broad and relevant sets of data about us and the context in which we live, contextual computing will generate relevant options for us, just as our brains do when we hear footsteps on a lonely street today.