What is a computer and where did it come from?

I am writing this in a cafe over lunch in Luxembourg. Sun is shining and vegetarian salade is on its way over...

The main guy who cracked the German Enigma code during World War II was Alan Turing...

What I've learned is that he is widely regarded as the visionary behind the computer. As a young student in his 20s, he came up with the idea after his boyfriend died. He was thinking of how his former boyfriend could have his mind exist after his body was gone. That got him thinking about mind and intelligence as an abstract concept.

So he is walking across a field one day and suddenly a revelation hits him. What if a machine working on simple instructions and given enough time could work through complex mathematical calculations? Could it do it faster and better than a human.

Isn't that incredible?

In the 30s for someone to come up with that idea when everything that had gone before was a machine to speed up manufacturing or make physical things.

This guy decides he wants to make a machine.

He ends up working / leading the code-breaking effort (which if it was left to human endeavour would have a probability of success of 50 million million million to 1).

So they crack the code with a very very complex machine. It had to crack the individual code from an individual Enigma machine on a daily basis (because each machine could be configured differently and independently each day).

And after the war, that become the foundation, the building block of the first mainframe computer.

And now we have the iPad. Such a supersmart machine.

It just amazes me how much of a radical concept this thought of a machine to calculate mathematics was.

On the trip to Luxembourg today I began thinking about the future of machines and intelligence. It really could take a leap forward if we were to capture the genius of a person's experience and wisdom to advise us.

Imagine standing on the shoulders of generations of experience and being able to master distinctions and skills with ease.

Like a personal coach, but more, so much more than exists today.

Somehow this wraps around your life like a fitted jacket, so that you let it take all the inputs of your life: your speech, your actions, your habits, your spending, your relationships, your work, your food. You want it to have all the inputs so that it can make some sense of them. You are able to serve up the kind of wisdom that you want to hear from the virtual coach. You want to be top of the game, you will get some strict no-nonsense coaching.

Think of all the computing our mind is doing on the back of all the daily stimulus. We're not in much of a fit state to process what's coming in and going on and separate the wood from the trees. What are we missing? What's so obvious to others but not clear to us?

How would sages from different era's advise us today?

Confucious? Buddha? Jesus?

Or living people from different walks of life:

Nelson Mandela? James Dyson? Richard Branson?

I began thinking about technology around personal finance. Man it is clunky and dumb. There is a site called mint which organises bank accounts and sorts expenses, but the paradigm that the banks still operate on is that you have to log in and suck out the information from your account.

To be able to put a personal finance platform together that allows you to categorise all the types of expenses you make and tracks it and pushes it to a portal that graphs it all in real-time would just be the dogs bollocks.

Being able to see what and where you are with money at all times...

Tie this into the coaching and you would see some amazing patterns of what happens when you get brilliant news and what happens when you get terrible news - how your conversations, your work and relationships are affected and how your spending pattern and eating and drinking pattern is affected.

We should be able to see the facts of how we are operating in the world. The facts and the results. Then you can have different interpretations on those facts.

Imagine seeing what phrases you repeat most often?

Pie in the sky stuff. But is it any more pie in the sky than the bloke who dreamed up the computer in the first place?

Dream on....

Location:Lunching in Luxembourg