There is a famous story about Diderot and his chair that starts with new furniture and ends with bankruptcy.

The story is often used to warn of the dangers of lifestyle creep, but I think it contains multiple lessons.

The lesson I learned from that story is the mirage of “personal computing”.

When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were in a life-or-death struggle to dominate the computing market in 1990, they both thought the same thing: the personal computer would change the world. They were right. Personal computing has changed the world. And the new world they created has become something even they could not have predicted. Super computers in our pockets. Calculators, maps, music players, cameras, banking systems, basically the entire toolbox of most white collar workers now fits in the palm of your hand. And that was all before large language models changed the world again.

Now, you have an always on intelligence personal assistant at your fingertips. Truly, we have reached the zenith of personal computing, have we not? It does feel like we have. Why?

If you’ve ever found yourself lost in strange lands on the internet, you may have come across the linux or unix power user community. Perhaps you’ve even dabbled in running Linux yourself. Maybe you’ve installed ubuntu or arch or fedora in an attempt to break free from the duopoly that is Windows or Mac.

You would think that this boom of intelligence would come with the ultimate exodus from the closed ecosystems of these companies. LLMs know Linux so well, you can actually just say “make my toolbar bigger and bright green” and your coding agent will do that. It’s so simple, it feels like magic.

But the thing that stops me from customizing my desktop just so - RICE-ing as the kids say - is a yawning pit of ennui. What is the goddamn point of making my computer my own, when I don’t even need a computer anymore?

I really like computers. I like using them, tinkering with them, fixing them, learning about them. I have 5-6 computers at home, all in various states of repair, and I am always scheming to get more. Computers are very fun. They are one of the most impressive tools humans have ever created and definitely the most impressive tool we mass produce. But, I struggle to see the point of my hoarding these days.

Tweaking and customizing your personal computer made sense in a world where you actually use that computer regularly. You need keybindings to quickly jump between your most used applications. You need ergonomically friendly layouts, colors that are easy on the eyes, and lightning fast performance so you’re never sitting around waiting for pages to load when you could be working, building, learning. All of these ideas are built on a foundational premise that you are the one doing the work on the computer.

But if a coding agent can run bash commands faster than me, can tab between applications faster, write code faster, and will happily monitor log files to find discrepancies for seconds, minutes, hours… Why do I need to sit at my desk and type, scroll, click, read?

The logical conclusion of artificial intelligence models that can use my computer in a relatively competent manner means the only reason I should be using my computer is to give them instructions, or for entertainment, I think.

But even that breaks down, eventually.

Video games are better played on a big screen on a dedicated console. Movies and shows are better watched on a TV from a comfortable couch with. Even writing, which has become reliant on the snappiness and easy editing of a word processor, would be better in a distraction free environment - perhaps a dedicated laptop with no internet connection.

We have built our workspaces and workforces around the personal computer. I worry we have not considered the ramifications of releasing millions of bots into our companies that use those computers faster and cheaper than we do. Computers are not personal, they are tools for bots.

As you move up the food chain in the corporate world, you use computers less. You don’t write code, you review code - you don’t type, you scroll. You don’t review code, you architect - you don’t scroll, you whiteboard. You don’t architect, you manage people - you don’t whiteboard, you meet. You don’t just manage people, you shape company direction - you don’t meet, you think.

What if we are all destined to be executives? CEOs of agent swarms, with our various agent VPs reporting to us, waiting for feedback. How much will we need personal computers then? Can’t we just make decisions on calls?

I will concede that any important documentation will need to be read on a larger screen - probably not a phone screen, but what if we flip between phones and wall TVs? We use voice chats with our agents, cast documents to our massive TVs to read, diagram via a whiteboard app, and just generally behave like a character out of Mad Men. We think, we brood, we make decisions, and the underlings do the dirty work of making it happen.

We could sit in our offices (if those are still deemed necessary), feet on the desk, cigar in mouth, reading the latest company reports on our e-reader that is updated by our executive assistant bot.

People have an inherit desire to personalize, and so that part of a computer will never go away. And yet…

Humans are good at speaking and good with tools.

The PC is the ultimate tool for knowledge work. What happens when that gets replaced by voice chat?

Simultaneously a return to a more primal existence and moving up another level of abstraction so we don’t even manipulate a keyboard or mouse. Our world will be entirely a world of ideas.