Goes right along with what Alan Kay has been saying - if you want to see the future in computing you can just buy it. Maybe today's analogue would be to give a smartphone a full reservation of a current supercomputer with 50 PFLOP/s and see what kind of application one could do by using computations on the phone's sensor? I'd imagine something AR related could be interesting, or applying some kind of NN training within seconds that would not be feasible on a phone today. Maybe throw in a quantum computer once supremacy over classical is achieved in some areas (which appears to be pretty close now, sidenote).
Or glasses, drone, watch.
Camera-equipped glasses that automagically capture the most AI-determined artful stills from your vision as photographs
Hey! If the shutter rate and the sensor chip's image processing bandwidth is high enough, one could even implement... moving pictures!
I was thinking an AR display with everyone’s LinkedIn profile details super imposed on top of them
I'm thinking a system that remote controls a robot, and relays the sensory impressions into my brain so I never have to leave the house. You could call it an androne.
You can buy the future in hardware - assuming you have a design. Given you can already buy compute power over the cloud today, 'buying hardware from the future' could perhaps mean a different architecture than just 'a large number of CPUs'.
Perhaps, but the cloud adds unavoidable latency that may be a bigger loss than what can be won with increased computing power.
The book "Dealers of Lightning" deals with this, and many things about Xerox PARC, its a great read.