There are two “personal” computing devices whose evolution is taking place as you sip coffee. The first is the decentralized personal assistant which holds and guards our personal experiences and our connections to society. We will carry it close to our bodies and employ it as a second mind and as a primary interface to the AI network. Its future is secure.

The fate of the second is tenuous and at risk. It is the centralized group assistant. It resides in our homes and offices, unifying the interfaces and screens therein. It is a repository of everything shared and will offer high intelligence, connectivity, and interactivity without the strict size, power, and ergonomic constraints of our smaller decentralized assistant. It is the “central computer” asserted by Futurists of the 20th century and it is at risk of a priori [before the fact] extinction. A fascination with aggressive, small and highly impendent devices is depleting the intellectual effort needed to advance powerful, shared, stationary ones. The fate of the central computer is in your hands.

- ”Inez Drew”

Inez suggests that we may have a choice, an opportunity to fulfill the promise of a powerful, shared computer that brings into harmony the people, screens, surfaces, and interfaces of our home. The evolution of today’s “desktop PC” into the “central computer” of the future is a high charge. But if it does not occur soon, the desktop PC risks losing its relevance in Darwin’s race to smaller and more nimble devices.

I offer a metaphor for the evolution of the PC. It was invented to make the power of computing useful to the individual. It succeeded. But individuals move around, so it shrank so that it could fit into our pocket or backpack. It developed a powerful wired network. Later, it learned how to speak over the airways so that as we moved from place to place it could retain access to the shared knowledge and social structures of humankind. These portable devices evolved along several paths each filling specific needs – the media player, the smart phone, the laptop – but they are converging and ultimately will converge to a single device, if we are to believe Inez.

The challenge is to undo the digital knot, an ease-of-use chasm created by computing devices which do not share common services, configurations, interfaces, capabilities, or network status. Inez suggests a centralized group assistant which is able to provide a uniform and powerful experience which can be shared within and outside the home. I suggest that the PC is poised to take on this role of the central computer, sooner than we may think. This evolutionary path is not without challenges and dangers, yet I have come to believe, after much thought, that this idea is a catalyst of change.

Will the PC still tethered, sitting watching the evolutionary progress of its portable offspring, have a second successful evolutionary path? That, Inez states, is in our hands. Her hypothesis is that in a future state, a central computer will bind our home together, joining together the technology deployed throughout and the occupants living therein. It will be secure, reliable, connected, powerful, able to rescue the information of our decentralized clients lost in a cafe in Bali. It will be our local outpost for the “cloud” and serve as a powerful but secure shared computing resource cataloging and interconnecting our shared digital memories from the present to the distant past.

Without such a change, I fear the digital home will stagnate while the desktop PC becomes a candidate for the endangered species list. I believe that the evolved PC must evolve into a digital nexus, a centralized group assistant instrumental in simplifying ease of use for our entire home computing and entertainment experience. The data is a flashing red light – the smaller devices are rapidly out-competing the desktop for share of wallet and share of mind. I suggest that a shared objective, a future state which directs our thought, our design and engineering will help speed the transformation before it is too late.

This is the second in a multi-part series.

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Simon Solotko is a Senior Advanced Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.