Here here! There's a laundry list of emerging industrial-scale technologies. But your post starts with what ought be the star of the tech show: personal technologies, empowering technologies. Dream Machines. Places for imagination, exploration. Soft systems that are malleable to users, that let them unleash their own creativity & potential, explore the models & systems about them, devise new viewpoints, new connections/connectivities.
Computers are not tools for programmers, they are augmentative systems for all activities of human intellect, or, they should be. In contrast, my feeling is that most of @malux85's tech laundry list are implementation details, research areas, maths: support systems & tech-wonky technics.
More tech for techies is not fun. More tech for industry and dollars is not fun. We need a real return to "create more value than you capture," (Tim Orielly) we need to be opening up potentials & possibilities, that others might roll with & explore. I thought you expressed that well, with this humble core statement:
> Of course you have an extensive list of things you wish your phone/computer/most-used apps could do; everyone does. You know the majority of it will remain a wishlist; there’s almost no hope of the feature you really want being implemented. This isn’t empowering.
Here here.
I have my own pet theories. Applications have gotten too big, prefigured too strongly. Computing itself, general systems research, has suffered greatly. The tides have been going the wrong way for years. Spotify used to have some really amazing plugins, with all sorts of awesome wild experiences. Closed. G+ social network launched so very long ago with only one api call: read posts. And it never grew another capability again. Applications have become totalizing experiences, where-as in the aughts there was this vision of intertwingularity, of interconnectedness, where each piece of computing was a reagent among a greater sea of computing systems, and that the user would have powers to shape the world about them.
Today's PG "what i worked on"[1] has one strong lesson that shows up a couple times, and it jives with this way things have gone: "the low end eats the high end." 'Worse is better,' (1989, in a book on lisp) in another form sort of/not really/but similar.
But I think our quest to build low systems has peaked. We've consumerized our industry to death, driven the ambition to compute better out. Everyone will swear to you that users want simple, but the whole paradigm is a black iron prison of a reality few have tried to escape from or even picture alternatives to. It's been profitable to industrialize, to take, to capture the softness of computing, and turn it into hard, simple, product. And with communications technology we've arisen radical new communicative capitalism, kept the simplified computing engaging by having it global-brain sized. Yes, I think it's ever so "realistic" to put forward "worse is better." But I continue to believe that computing is a much more broadly interesting & engaging medium, if we can undo some of the shackles that our assumptions have lead us towards, if we can build bold open exciting programmable-for-everyone malleable end-user-programmable information spaces. Make things live, data-oriented[2], record the events/processing that happen as more logged data... some possible suggestions. Towards expanding user agency, radically, across systems.
Computing needs to go high road, some day. Fancier forms of computing need to emerge, not for techies, but for us all; computing where humanity has agency & power & respect, can monitor observe & see the systems in action, the pitri dish of computing unfurling around them, and where they can replicate
& experiment & test their agencies & powers. Computing must again fight for the user. Thank you for this wake up call Feifan, for identifying our disconnects, the impotency we have wrought.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSNda9EzNOI#t=27m43s