It may be Microsoft propaganda, but I’m okay with that…
“As people find more ways to incorporate these inexpensive, flexible and infinitely customisable devices into their lives, the computers themselves will gradually “disappear” into the fabric of our lives. We are still a long way from a world full of disembodied intelligent machines, but the computing experience of the coming decade will be so seamless and intuitive that–increasingly–we will barely notice it. At the same time, computing will become widespread enough that we will take it for granted–just as most people in the developed world today trust the telephone service.
The pervasiveness and near–invisibility of computing will be helped along by new technologies such as cheap, flexible displays, fingernail-sized MEMs (microelectromechanical systems) chips capable of storing terabytes of data, or inductively powered computers that rely on heat and motion from their environment to run without batteries.
The economics of computing will also bring change. Decreasing costs will make it easy for electronics manufacturers to include PC-like intelligence and connectivity in even the most mundane devices. Eventually, computing power itself could become almost too cheap to meter.
All this will lead to a fundamental change in the way we perceive computers. Using one will become like using electricity when you turn on a light. Computers, like electricity, will play a role in almost everything you do, but computing itself will no longer be a discrete experience. We will be focused on what we can do with computers, not on the devices themselves. They will be all around us, essential to almost every part of our lives, but they will effectively have “disappeared.”
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http://www.disappearing-computer.net/
“The Disappearing Computer (DC) is a EU-funded proactive initiative of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) activity of the Information Society Technologies (IST) research program. [...]
The mission of the initiative is to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people’s lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today.”