If the Palm Pre Really Can "Precog" Our Needs, Should We Thank Jeff Hawkins or Don Norman?

There has been a lot of talk about the Palm Pre and how its name is meant to invoke the phone's ability to anticipate your needs and act upon them before you ask it to. A couple of concrete examples have come straight from Roger McNamee, head of Elevation Partners, a tech-centric venture capital firm which now has 20% of its fund in Palm, in this video interview:

"...but better than that, it does stuff for you. When you wake up in the morning, it has taken your calendar, if you ask it to, downloaded the maps for your whole day, downloaded the Wikipedias for the people you're going to visit and the companies you're going to see. Why is it on PCs you have to go and do all that? And when you're late -- get this -- when you're late, it -- remember, this thing has GPS, it has a clock, and it has your calendar, so it not only knows where you are, it knows where you're supposed to be and when -- and so when it realizes you're going to be late, it says, 'hey, not only are you going to be late, but I can take care of it for you. I can send an email to your assistant, or to the people in the meeting...which would you prefer? And oh, by the way, here's the map.'"

To many, this sounds like something that blurs the line between magic and sentient robots (witchcraft meets Skynet, if you will). To others, it's the logical culmination of converging technologies, and, frankly, they're not sure why it took so long. One such person is Don Norman, an industrial designer with a resume a mile long; he's worked at Apple and HP, is a design professor at Northwestern University, and is co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Don Norman gave the keynote at the 2005 PalmSource Developer's Conference (the last year the event was held). In that speech, he professed amazement and dismay at his car's inability to put to good use the basic technologies already in and around it. Paraphrasing (from memory) that portion of his speech:

"So my car, a BMW, has a computer on board that lets me know when the oil needs to be changed. What does it do with this information? It illuminates a little light on the dashboard and then expects me to respond appropriately. Why not provide a little more information? Instead of just an idiot light, why can't it use the GPS it has to tell me the phone number of the nearest BMW dealership? Let's take that one step further. The car has Bluetooth so I can send and receive calls through my cellphone when I'm driving. My cellphone also has my calendar in it. Why doesn't my car, sensing it needs an oil change, look at my calendar, figure out a 2-hour period when I'm not busy, add an appointment, call the dealership, make the appointment, and then let me know all that's been done? The technology is there...we just need to integrate it and make it talk to each other."

Clearly, if the Pre comes out with the type of precognitive powers Roger McNamee is describing, the Palm engineers and designers working on webOS took Dr. Norman's comments to heart.

Of course, given the efforts Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot and founder of Palm) has put into mapping cognition and other fundamental activities of the brain, as well as his close ties to Palm even now, he may have been even more influential on this amazing capacity for anticipatory assistance.

Personally, I'm hoping webOS and the Pre are as revolutionary as the Pilot was back in the Spring of 1996. It's been 13 years...we're due for something exciting from Palm.