I often come across situations in product management for software that I find a perfect activity for a computer to do on my behalf and when I present it to engineers they chortle that while the computer can calculate the value for me it would take five minutes to give me the answer and I would be unwilling to wait that long. So while direct and specific questions may be incompatible with my interaction to my computer, it has plenty of spare cycles to do work for me while plugged into the power cord that I supply it. This is why people have recruited desktop computers to do useful things like look for aliens (SETI at home), and calculate the folding structure of proteins(folding at home), or transmit illegal copies of Metallica songs to strangers while they are apparently idle. While I think these are noble goals I also have the belief that while slavery is not a moral way to operate with people, that the computer really is my property and it should be doing work for me at all times. In fact I grew-up with a good Jewish guilt ridden upbringing where my parents told me that I had to clean my plate because people in other countries and in unfortunate places in this country didn’t have enough food to eat. So I detest the idea that I am wasting all of these valuable computer cycles when I am not sitting in front of it.

Lately I have been provided a lot of software that does work for me on my computer in the little tray on the right hand corner of the screen. At first these did things that could be done far away from me but more efficiently like a weather-bug to provide me with the weather. This has gotten supplanted by more useful bedtime machinations like indexing my hard drive so that I have a workable search tool from a couple of major desktop search products like Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop Search. At Viapoint we are working on ways to organize all of the information in your life while you sleep so that the next day you have what you need all tidy and ready to go.

This type of as you sleep software I think is a revolutionary leap despite it having a long history of other products and many impatient initial users getting nervous about the big numbers of memory consumption or the fighting among the software products for the unused cycles of the processor to trick the others into believing the computer is really active. There is a long history of computers working while we sleep. Products like OLAP take mounds of data that you can’t just query and mold them into summaries that executives can use to make statements like "The COGS numbers look good this quarter and the forecast for APAC is showing real progress."
I think going back to working in your sleep to organize information goes further back than computers themselves. As humans we sleep and scientists suggest that when we dream our brains are actually doing work to cement ideas from our short term memory into our long term memory. Our sleeping brains are busy while we are dreaming synthesizing the trends and flushing out information that has been deemed unimportant for memory. We are organizing and indexing our own internal desktops. So I am hoping, while I don’t want my unconscious slave computers to get too unruly, that in a sense I can satisfy my guilt in wasting cycles by allowing my computers to do the dream work of organizing my thoughts at night while I do the same in my plush bed.

Alternatively I could give access to nocturnal aliens who need my computer to support a complex deceitful plot to monitor weather patterns in an attempt to find the perfect weather for an E-Day to invade the planet and enslave our race while listening through their orange and green ear bud horns to "Nothing Else Matters".