I don't know where to begin so I'll just quote chunks and respond to them.
> Our data will stay on our mobile computers and be backed up (encrypted of course) in the cloud
If one's phone is stolen or destroyed, how does one restore from the cloud backup? What prevents me from buying a 2nd phone and attempting to "restore" it from my friend's backup? Do I just have to guess his password? I'm imagining something like Apple's iCloud backups but that service involves a lot of details that need to be right to ensure its security. That costs money, which means users either have to pay in cash or by having their data mined (or both).
I predict that the most popular backup service in this hypothetical world would be a free service that leaves user data unencrypted and sells it to 3rd parties.
> We will carry with us the fundamental representation of our identity, backed and verified by advanced encryption, instead of cumbersome passwords or logins associated with the same large platforms that control our social lives
That's great until the battery dies or there's a hardware failure or the phone is lost or stolen. Then you have to restore from a backup and that means verifying your identity in some other manner. At some point, identity reduces to a combination of: 1. A password or secret. (Something you know.) 2. A token issued by some trusted entity declaring you are who you claim to be. (Something you have.) 3. A biometric. (Something you are.) Assuming your phone is dead, only option 1 can be used without a 3rd party storing identifying information about you.
> Sharing of data, either broadly with a large group or directly person to person, will happen directly between mobile computers, skipping the intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter we’re used to today
People's phones aren't always online at the same time. Sometimes they're in a tunnel or on a plane or away from civilization. Given that constraint, who is storing and transmitting the data between the two people? Who runs the service that lets phones say, "I'm Bob's phone. I want to talk to Alice's phone. What is her IP? Oh she's offline? OK send her this data when she's back." Are they compensated for doing so? If not, why would they run such a service?
> Artificial assistance will be local first – for example, searches for the best nearby coffee shop will turn to the nearby network for responses before asking the entire planet
I seriously doubt the local network would give better recommendations and results than Yelp or Google Maps, as both entities would sync the local info to their own databases and run their own algorithms on the data. Their results would be a superset of the local data with better algorithms. Who curates the local network's results for spam or fake reviews? Why would they have an incentive to do so?
> Machine learning will provide personalized intelligent assistance that runs on your own mobile computer
I don't think that could work. The latest phones have hardware to run ML algorithms efficiently, but they don't have the hardware to train them. That requires TPUs and a lot of power. Also you need large data sets to train models. That means aggregating lots of people's data.
Most people either don't understand or don't care about the implications of Facebook/Google/Amazon slurping up information about them. If anything, people prefer it because they get a better experience. Their news feed has more interesting content. Their Amazon recommendations more closely match what they want. Their search results are more relevant. For these people, the current situation is a win-win.
I'm not against this idea, I just don't think it has a chance of working. For something new to succeed, it needs to be more compelling than existing products. More importantly, it needs to offer advantages that existing products can't copy. If at the end of the day you build something that's slightly less convenient to use than Facebook, it doesn't matter how privacy-centric it is. You'll only attract a few idealists.