Are Faster Chips Leaving Programmers in the Dust? Or Do The Just Lack Imagination?

From the article:

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust - New York Times

So, Mr. Mundie, a Microsoft CTO, thinks that people will utilize the power these new processor designs might offer to do such things as automate e-mail processing - a fairly mundane task that's currently somewhat taken care of by the better e-mail clients, including Microsoft Outlo0k. I don't want to disappoint Craig, but I have my doubts about this one. Not that the processor technologies will enable new personal computing paradigms, just that people will take advantage of the automation.

I see too many people who barely take advantage of the capabilities their software offers them now. Just sticking with Outlook and with a very unscientific sampling method: walking around my office and talking to friends it's easy to see that most people don't use the features such as "Rules", Category Tagging, Folders, Flagging, Voting Buttons, Delayed Delivery, or Direct Replies to. The only feature you see regularly used is Signatures and Stationary and perhaps some use of color.

Does Craig seriously think people will bother to learn how to get their software to filter their mail according to rules they've set up (themselves), and act upon these rules? No matter how simple? How transparent? Maybe a geek like me would - after all, I know about the features. Most people aren't even aware of them.

So yes, the faster processors that may be coming cold have an affect on digital device use and the personal computing paradigm. But it won't be in these areas.

In fact, if history is any guide, we're not really going to be able to imagine how these new processors will be used. If all that Microsoft can think of is e-mail automation, I would not be surprised to find them falling behind some upstart with a better idea.