Friday 20 January 2012

Computer-assisted living

I've been thinking about a futuristic setting recently, and specifically about the computer programs available within it. The setting comes from a series of novels, and they're told from the point of view of a deck jockey, a computer programmer, but he makes a point that most of his job is management of various programs that act on their own algorithmic agenda.
So I've been coming up with programs that would follow these different fits, based on what I think a character would want.

Aggies - aggregator bots.
A cross between a search engine and a RSS feed, you could keep them running at all times or send them out on a specific task. Examples would include:
Fetch, the basic searchbot. Would go out on request, crawl through the World Wide Mesh and collate what it found into a hyperlinked digest, similar to what we see on Wikipedia. Depending on the nature of the search query, and the nature of user/fetch, the data mined might appear immediately, or added to over time once various darknets are trawled, or even securities bypassed.
News, the basic feedbot. Would collate headlines from topics that the user has already inputted. Could collate data in a similar format to a news website or in a similar hyperlinked digest to Wikipedia. Would be programmed to pull from different sources, so an engineer or biologist could pull from journal publications, a glamour-bopping tween could pull from various celebrity magazines and so on.
Shopper, a feedbot that brings you the best deals on the products you want, groceries or tech. Would also have a fetch function.

Blackbooks - organiser bots.
The trend in online software suites makes me think this would be the natural extension of certain parts of Google's products, as well as Apple's Siri.
Would naturally include a calendar/organiser function, a contactbook for keeping phone/mail addresses (I don't think we're far from them being the same things, looking at Skype or Google Talk or Viber). Would collate emails for the user.
Would also likely have access to basic business or work software, so could produce documents or spreadsheets and so on.
Might include a scrobbler function, collating various pieces of data across different programs, so allows a news feed to update based on user location with local events, or a shopper bot to pick up on recent developments in tech that the user has been looking into via a fetch, or concert tickets for the latest boyband craze based on music preferences.

I'm currently working on others. Any ideas people think everyone would use in the future?

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