A science fictional idea, free to good home

[nancylebov]

I was thinking it might be fun to torment people with visions of a future where computers work, and when I say work, I mean the simplicity, reliability, and transparency of an old-fashioned landline. You learned how to use a phone when you were a kid, the interface was fairly simple and intuitive, and then you knew how to use a phone. For decades.

The problem is, I have no idea how such a world would work. Would it take "do what I mean" capacity for computers, including the ability to make sense of vague and possibly incoherent desires? That would be the program which could write this story for me.

Greatly increased human intelligence, so that managing computers is no harder than counting to three is now?

Something else?

For that matter, I have no idea what would be a worthwhile story to set in a world where computers work, if the story is not going to be about computers ceasing to work. (Difficulties of interfacing with alien computers?)

The idea lacks dramatic tension. In fact, if there were such a thing as lacking dramatic tension on steroids, this would be it.

People would have to have a war or something.

I guess it's karma. A computer annoyed me (I can't even remember about what, there are so many things), so I thought I could annoy you folks, and I ended up annoying myself some more. Anyway, I hope this question offers some entertainment or annoyance or something.

There may be hope-- it's not quite a Do What I Mean situation, but it was reasonably easy to find out how to recover a file on a Windows 7 machine, and then do it. Who knows what wonders the future may bring?

I will probably outlive the need to reinstall the comments button for Facebook every time Firefox updates.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My dream is not to just have phones which are as easy to use, but the full range of computer applications. This being said, it sounds as though the iPhone is probably easier than an old-fashioned landline.