Ubiquitous computing

The most profound technologies are the ones that disappear. Ubiquitous computing goes beyond the individual device. It is embedded into the fabric of everyday life. It is Mark Weiser's idea, from The Computer for the 21st Century (1991) at Xerox PARC, and ETH made its own contribution to the field through Prof. Friedemann Mattern and his lab.

Why it matters to me

This is one of the two ideas I love building at the intersection of. The best technologies are the ones that disappear into the fabric of everyday life.

I arrived at it twice. First without knowing it existed: we built the ubiquitous computer in the summer of 2020 without yet knowing that ubiquitous computing was a whole field of research. Then deliberately, in Christian Holz's Ubiquitous Computing class at ETH, which is also where I learned how much can be extrapolated from the data of simple IoT sensors — the insight behind Learning from interactions. Digging into the history of the idea is how I fell in love with Weiser's paper and eventually the Web of Things.

It drove the first years of Omnia, and I quit it in 2023: when Neom's cognitive city collapsed I turned away from ubiquitous computing altogether and spent the rest of the gap year on Internet Computer infrastructure instead.

It came back in 2024 with Fabric and even more so recently thanks to AI agents and Context Use. AI agents will get us to the real ubiquitous computer paradigm we had been dreaming of. Machines are finally fitting the human environment instead of forcing us into theirs. In the near future, we will see an unbundling of the computer into many devices, each optimized for a specific type of human-agent interaction. Finally, devices will become peripherals of one ubiquitous computer and the AI agent will be our own Virtual Persona or Digital Self. Context Use is what will ensure that it's you controlling the agent and not vice versa.

Ubiquitous computing by itself says nothing about who controls it, which is why I only find it worth building at its intersection with digital sovereignty.