Computers 2.0 – Digital Concierges That Make Technology Seamless

There’s much talk about harnessing LLMs, AI agents, and similar technologies to revolutionise how we use technology to enhance our lives. Yet I sense a reluctance to articulate the obvious next step—a step well within reach, given what we already know in AI and software engineering. The idea is to transform laptops, phones and smart glasses into digital concierges that enable a far more seamless technological augmentation of the human mind than what we experience today.

Let’s begin by expressing this intuition—this vision of a seamless digital concierge—as a high-level user story, to make it more easily understandable.

As a human,

I want to use a single digital concierge that I can interface with in natural language, to manage my entire digital landscape and its resources. This includes my intellectual assets (e.g. books, plans, calendars, documents, communications such as email, WhatsApp, etc.), ancillary files and content (e.g. apps, tokens), and legitimate functions and actions (e.g. publishing a post in a social medium, adjusting security settings in my device) across all systems I’ve enrolled in to support my intellectual capabilities and real-world activities,

So that:

• I can engage with and manage these assets through thoughts that would naturally occur to me, such as:

  
  

  • “May I see the scans of my daughter Eliza’s kindergarten enrolment form, and know her enrolment date?”

    
    

  • “I’m not sure I saved Mary’s invoice for my Save the Cat website in my cloud archives. If I haven’t, let’s do that—then please tag it under Expenses, Consulting, Save the Cat, Mary Hopkins, Ruwan’s Website.”

    
    

  • “Let’s see the list of all cloud files I’ve created related to my consulting work on communicable diseases in the MENA region.”

    
    

  • “Please grab this manuscript and use it to update the version of my Amazon Kindle e-book Garden Birds of Ceylon, and report to me any non-circumventable errors raised by KDP.”

    
    

  • “What’s going on, X, related to the salt shortage in Sri Lanka? Give me a snapshot of about 50 posts.”

    
    

• Without wasting time navigating human-computer interfaces and systemic processes, such as:

  
  

  • Clicking through GUIs to find files, specific content within files, or reach action buttons and upload forms.

    
    

  • Following multiple system-specific authentication and workflow protocols just to retrieve a snippet of information or perform a routine task—like transferring an email attachment to secured cloud storage and applying custom tags—after I’ve properly enrolled and securely authenticated myself at the root level via the concierge.

    
    

In other words, we want to eliminate any protocols and procedures that do not add direct value to my human thoughts concerning the object or subject of my attention.

Now, this doesn’t mean that a digital concierge device’s operating system would lack a GUI. Of course it will have one—but of a flexible, generic kind, used primarily to deliver value-added information directly to the user following natural language prompting. Displaying a list of files, photos, or videos; showing a snapshot of comments on one’s Facebook post; and enabling interaction with such content—all of this would still be possible and necessary.

The biggest challenge, I suspect, lies not in refining available AI models to interpret human needs, nor in the software engineering effort required to build the operating system or GUI for such a device.

Rather, the true challenge will be in standardising security protocols and building the trust required for third-party integrations—so that meaningful, value-added work can be done seamlessly under the hood via APIs, which can be appropriately incentivised or monetised by their providers. Over time, apps and websites may fade into the background, replaced by the APIs that define their purposes. The digital concierge will centrally do—or at least front—all the human interfacing work.

This impending HCI revolution resonates with a deeper truth about how the human mind integrates information and instructs action in the real world—without clutter. One of the most important intuitions in the study of consciousness is that the hardware, algorithms, and communication mechanisms underpinning the actual objects of thought (e.g. “Hmm… what shall I have, rice or pasta?”) are completely invisible to the thoughts themselves. In fact, some philosophers have suggested that the very notion of consciousness arises when the machinery of consciousness becomes transparent—that is, invisible—to the salient information processing that constitutes the thought (Metzinger et al.).

While this remains a speculative philosophical notion, it powerfully informs our technological direction. The fewer the intermediary housekeeping steps and processes, the closer we come to a world where a computer could someday be ‘plugged in’ directly to the mind. Perhaps initially via smart glasses tracking eye movements and following verbal instructions, but ultimately just being in tune with our thoughts.

Think about that…