Stefan Weitz

*Free e-book ARC provided by the publisher through Edelweiss/Above the Treeline. No money or goods were exchanged, and all views are my own.*

The senior director at Microsoft Bing discusses some of the ways in which the way we search and use the Internet can be smarter and more interactive, and how that might change our lives in the next few years.

Predicting the future of tech can be difficult, which Weitz admits from the beginning. He is also a "techno-optimist" and while he addresses concerns such as privacy and accessibility, he definitely thinks that all of this will be ironed out mostly for the good. I'm not sure I agree with him that it will be quite so easy, and quite honestly thinking about all the different places that have some information about my digital person made me contemplate getting rid of Facebook and my smartphone. But at the same time, I know putting that cat back into the bag is probably useless - and we should be talking about what we want it to look like. Essentially, Weitz argues that we will soon have the tools to make Search not just sending some keywords and getting a variety of links through which we have to work to figure out what we want to do, but that devices can start interacting in such a way that they actually figure out what we want to do - so when I'm looking for "Chinese restaurants near Boston," it "knows" that what I really want to do is make reservations, and will tell me which ones nearby are in my price range and not too busy, and be able to follow through on making the reservation without all the intermediate steps there are today. A lot of what he has to say is intriguing, and definitely worth the conversation.… (altro)