The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most of what we’re really talking about here, is that we didn’t get to where we are tod

The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most of what we’re really talking about here, is that we didn’t get to where we are today by accident. As long as humans have eyes and trichromatic vision similar to what we have today, a 2D RGB display is going to be a useful medium for presenting information for us. As long as humans have ears, audible presentation and vocal interaction are going to be of limited usefulness because they are so disruptive for everyone else. As long as humans have small, light fingers with fine motor control, devices like keyboards and mice and joysticks and trackballs and touchpads and touchscreens are going to be useful for controlling a system. As long as humans have big, heavy arms with imprecise muscle movement, 3D spacial interactions with sweeping, dramatic arm movements will belong in the movies, where the hero can find the bad guy in a few seconds instead of three days of tedious searching. No doubt presentation and interaction methods will continue to evolve, but fundamentally we humans will probably still have the same senses and motor skills in ten or twenty years that we have today, so radical change seems unlikely in the near future. It’s also hard to believe that either natural language processing or data mining and predictive systems will advance so much in the next few years that they will supplant other means of interacting with technology rather than supplementing them, so again it’s hard to see established tools like keyboards and screens going away any time soon.