I Want My Ubiquitous Computing Already…
Agile like AI is a tool that should disappear into the background
If you’re old enough, you might remember the AT&T Commercials that promised “You Will” airing around ‘93 or ‘94 (see here and here). Today, some of these things are reality. Being a science fiction fan my whole life, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the future every single day since I was a teenager. And today, some of the future has arrived. The movie Minority Report, for example, predicted a handful of technologies that are now becoming part of our reality 20-some years later.
The future I imagine includes the promises of something called “Ubiquitous Computing”, a term I feel is so old it’s almost been forgotten. This idea, however, feels like the ultimate destination. Technology that is so advanced it just lives alongside us, interacting with us, maybe even interpreting what we need… in our walls, cars, clothes, and devices. Remember when the advertisers in the mall noticed Tom Cruise walking by and asked him if he wanted a Guinness?
We’re still on that path, but I think we need to adjust our mindset a bit in order to get it right. We’re still very focused on the technology first.
Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format.
— Wikipedia (link)
Ubiquitous Computing feels closer than ever. Especially if Siri gets that AI upgrade that is the current rumor. AI is becoming commonplace. People are starting to expect tools to just be smarter. Generative AI is not much more than 18 months old and already it’s everywhere. All of the Adobe Creative Cloud products have a bit of FireFly Generative AI features in them. Want to turn your fancy font into one with rainbow colored fuzzy hair? There’s an app for that. Beyond turning words into pictures, the world of content creators has gotten a gigantic boost and a flurry of new products that enable the use of generative AI in almost anything you can imagine.
And yet, like the point I made in my last post, AI is not the destination. The things that have led agile transformations to fail are the same things that will lead AI implementations to fail. AI is not the strategy of Adobe. Some startups will get it wrong. But the ones that get it right will win. Incorporating AI features and capabilities into our products and content will soon become so commonplace we won’t even need to say things like “powered by AI”.
In my life as an Agile Coach, we would often say things like “Agile is not the destination”. Teams should not be striving to be perfect implementors of Scrum. A company gets no extra brownie points for being good at Scaled Agile. The goal should always be about delivering value, about the business at the core of what you do.
So, my hope, is that the better we continue to get at understanding and applying advanced processes like scaling agile into a mindset that impacts the culture of the whole organization and incorporating advanced tools like AI everywhere it makes sense to create competitive advantage… the more these things will fade into the background. They’re not the thing we mention first anymore. We’re not in an agile transformation. We’re not building products powered by AI. We’re just great companies, serving our customers with great products. That’s the future I hope for.
I’m ready for the future where these things that are still full of hype and misunderstandings become well understood, pervasive, and the norm. It reminds me of Arthur C Clarke, science fiction author and innovator. Clarke wrote about the future a lot. He literally invented the concept of geosynchronous orbits. Clarke’s three laws in particular are as relevant as ever:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke
I look forward to applying all of my learnings from agile transformations and finding ways to use that knowledge to the benefit of my clients as the wave of AI takes over and drowns us in new ideas, new tools, and new ways of working.
If the AI robots help bring ubiquitous computing… I will welcome our new robot overlords.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach and AI Advisor who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the Agile and AI universes into easy to understand and simple common sense.
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