The Future Of… Tech

How will phones, computers, voice assistants and cars change in the next few years? We spoke to Huawei, Intel, Amazon and Formula One to find out…

- Matt Bolton, Rob Clymo

Intel …ON THE FUTURE OF… Computing

From new computer designs that will save your back and eyes, to keeping your digital footprint secure and protecting you from online harassers, here’s how computers will change in the years to come

Melissa Gregg is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, and whose work involves researching how people use their devices, and working that into Intel’s strategies. She’s part of the team developing Project Athena, a template for a new generation of laptops designed to address recent changes in how we work as a society.

Do you think there’s an important distinction between a more traditional computer with a full interface, and simpler devices or appliances that have invisible software?

I think that there’s an interesting continuum right now where the visibility, or the literacy required of computing, is much broader than it once was. It’s very easy to talk to an Echo or a Google Home. It doesn’t require you to have a great deal of programming knowledge in order to have the end result of knowing what the weather’s going to be.

But at the other end, you have a lot of options for people who are then highly literate in engineering and software to be able to modularise or change or optimise their device, depending on the task they have, or their expertise, or their desired experience thereafter. So that growth in opportunity, and maybe the democratising impulse of technology innovation, is something to be quite excited about.

Intel, as with many phone makers, is building AI into its chips. Now that it’s in so many devices, what’s the next way it will help productivity and the way people use computers generally?