Searching for the Hundred Year UI

Of the many thought-provoking essays written by Paul Graham, his Hundred Year Language thought experiment has always struck me as fascinating. Unlike Graham’s conclusion—in which he concludes that a language described in 1958 would provide the basis for the Hundred Year Language—I think user interface design provides a wide scope for invention and reinvention.

What’s inspirational about Graham’s challenge, is his notion that perhaps by looking out a hundred years, we can begin adopting approaches that will prove to be fruitful in moving us toward the hundred year mark right now. 

How could we possibly see a hundred years out?

It’s important to remember that the GUI is 30+ years old. The visionaries who foresaw our present—Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay—needed a view that stretched 40 to 50 years in advance of the state of art. If they could see to the 40 or 50 year horizon, why shouldn’t we, equipped with additional information drawn from the history of computing, aim to shoot for a hundred? By combining our historical understanding with a creative vision, why shouldn’t our vision reach ahead that far?

Principles in our search

I would like to propose some principles that should stand us in good stead.

1. Human cognition will change only gradually over the next hundred years.  Jakob Nielsen reports that conclusions from interaction research performed twenty and thirty years ago are still valid. There’s no reason to believe these results will change (much, if at all) over the next hundred years.
2. Culture may change significantly. Any study of modern history demonstrates the significant cultural changes that can occur over the course of a hundred years. Whether that is due to economic, industrial, technological, political or philosophical causes, cultural attitudes and outlooks can change substantially.
3. Technology development will continue unabated. Unless our economic system is systemically interrupted by drastic events (think: peak oil), technological development will increase the capabilities of our machinery to virtually unimaginable levels. (Paul Graham’s thought is that the lower bound of computational performance over the next hundred years is a million times faster. Now, he might be able to imagine that, but I’d consider the experience of a million-times faster computer to be virtually unimaginable. Let us try, though.)
4. Programming will still be hard. Fred Brooks won’t be disproven in the next hundred years: there will still be no silver bullet. Programming is an unnatural act—asking humans to be purely logical when we are designed for emotional response—and the rate of progress in programming productivity won’t be any greater than that demonstrated by the last thirty years.

As we progress on this search, we may very well decide that there are other principles we can treat as axiomatic. When we do, it will mightily assist our capacity to envision the future.

Now let’s get creative! How about joining me in envisaging what our UIs may be like in a hundred years?

Comments

[Paul]

Consider what the interaction of two of your principles might imply: Technology development will continue unabated & programming will still be hard. If the former is true (as embodied in the million-fold growth estimate of computational power), then programming might be hard but it will become invisible. I cannot conceive of a million-fold increase in computation - but I can conceive that if it is applied to any programming task then even brute-force attempts to solve complex but tractable problems will result in programs that work and are emitted "magically" from our machines. Who needs Adobe when your machine can invent Photoshop on the fly in a few minutes or less? Who cares about bugs when software is so self-aware that it can search and resolve all internal problems virtually instantaneously? Will programmers and software houses disappear in favor of machines that solve our problems as soon as we enunciate them?

[Loryn Jenkins]

Paul: Your comment set off a chain reaction of a lot of thoughts this evening; they almost entirely dominated my thinking throughout tonight's walk (7km). As soon as I arrived home, I began slapping my notes into Tinderbox. You'll see the thoughts your note set off sometime soon.

[Paul]

Loryn, looking forward to your next post on this topic. Couple more ideas. Cognition will change slowly. Will cognition in fact stop evolving? We've offloaded more and more cognitive tasks from our brains - so do we no longer need to adapt? Culture will change significantly. It always does - but does that really matter to UI and technology in general? Anyone from 1803 or 1710 or any other era could learn all about the context that gives rise to Twitter in 30 minutes (assuming the rest of the culture shock that has nothing to do with machines doesn't stun them first). Another thought - if there really is an uncanny valley (debatable), will future UIs cross over it? Consider "Avatar" - it almost blows away the uncanny valley in CGI. But even in 3D the fourth wall still exists. Is there a similar but more shattering event in the near future for UI? How immersive can our machines become? What if there are no walls to a UI?