I expect apps to largely disappear from my daily life within five to ten years.
Not because their functions will no longer be needed, but because I will no longer need to know which app to open for which action. I pick up a screen and say what I want. The technology works out for itself which services are required.
I no longer want to visit my calendar, navigation app and restaurant app to organise an appointment. I say:
Plan a lunch in Groningen tomorrow. Make sure I leave on time, avoid traffic jams and choose a quiet restaurant with good parking.
The screen takes care of the rest. It consults my calendar, calculates the route and finds a suitable table. Only when there is a real choice to be made does it involve me.
The device I need for that hardly needs to be a phone. A screen with a data connection is essentially enough. The interface does not exist beforehand; it appears at the moment I need it. Today the screen shows a route, tomorrow a set of accounts and after that perhaps a control panel for my home. As soon as the task is complete, the interface disappears again.
Yet something essential is still missing.
To make this possible, I have to give an AI access to my identity, money, messages, calendar and perhaps even my medical information. The question is therefore not only what such a system can do. The more important question is what I dare entrust to it.
I do not want to give general permission to “use my bank”. I want to be able to say:
You may pay this restaurant no more than forty euros today.
I do not want to share all my medical information. I want to decide which doctor may see which document, for what purpose and until what time. After that, access must disappear automatically.
Before every important action, I want to see in ordinary language what is about to happen. Not sixty pages of terms and conditions, but one clear agreement:
This information will be shared with this party, solely for this purpose, until noon tomorrow.
Then I decide.
Afterwards, I also want to be able to check what my AI has done. Not through a technical log that only programmers understand, but in plain sentences: what information was used, what choice was made and what action was carried out.
And I want one emergency button. The moment I lose trust, I must be able to revoke all access immediately.
To me, that is the missing layer of the future: a personal trust mechanism positioned between me, my AI and all digital services. A combination of passport, notary, key ring and black box.
My rules remain mine:
Book nothing without a cancellation option.
Do not share my location after the route has been calculated.
Always ask permission above one hundred euros.
Never use my personal information for advertising.
The AI may become increasingly intelligent, but that does not make my boundaries less important. Quite the opposite. The more independently the system can act, the more precisely I must be able to determine on whose behalf, for what purpose and for how long it may do so.
I think back to the rainbow I saw above Horsewei 10. Technology can explain exactly how sunlight is refracted in raindrops. It can improve the photograph, determine the location and retrieve the image from among thousands of files.
But it does not need to tell me what that moment meant.
I want to preserve that distinction. Technology may organise, calculate and act. The meaning remains mine.
Perhaps that is ultimately the simplest form of trust: not that my AI knows everything about me or decides everything for me, but that it knows its boundary.
I will no longer need a hundred apps. Just a screen, a connection and a system that remembers, at every important step, who is in charge.