When we dream of the future, we usually start by imagining better things. But a recent discussion of how user interfaces will evolve and change caused Rik Myslewski to wonder…

When Bill Atkinson talks about the user interface of the future, it’s wise to sit up and listen.

Back in the early 1980s, Atkinson was the principal designer of the then-futuristic UI that you and I now use everyday: that of the original Macintosh.

Speaking at an Industry Forum at Macworld Expo in January, Atkinson outlined his vision of the future of human-computer interaction—a vision that’s both appealing and disquieting. Tomorrow’s computing, Atkinson argues, will be increasingly mobile. And when he says mobile, he’s not referring to laptops; he’s talking about smartphones and the like. That distinction, by the way, is nicely described by Intel’s mobility guru Mooly Eden, who divides mobile devices into those you carry with you and those you carry on you. Atkinson’s future involves the latter, nestled in your pocket or purse.

Poking and stroking those devices, as we do today, is inconvenient because of their meager screen real estate, and it’s also limited by their need for both visual and tactile interaction. Wouldn’t it be better, Atkinson reasons, to simply talk with your device? Specifically, to conduct an interactive, natural-language conversation with a personal virtual assistant who answers your questions and assists your memory of to-do lists, appointments, places, and “I know that guy’s face but not his name—some help here, please?”

A few technical hurdles need to be leaped before that vision could be realized. The thorniest is true natural-language conversational ability—not mere pattern-matching speech recognition, but instead, as Atkinson explains, “the actual understanding of a deep body of knowledge of how the world works, understanding the flow of the conversation—what’s being talked about.” Computer-based natural language has been the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence wonks for years.

But it’s no longer a mere Star Trek dream, as demonstrated by IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson QA supercomputer, which caused such a stir this February among the geekerati.

Other technical challenges are comparative child’s play: a Bluetooth earpiece that adds a video camera to the now-standard speaker and microphone, and a cloud-based personal virtual assistant that receives queries from your mobile device and responds with answers.

And that’s where Atkinson’s vision causes me to squirm a bit. Let me explain. Today, when we ask questions of the web, we’re given a multitude of answers that we can visually scan and choose from. That list is paid for by advertising. Atkinson’s vision makes both choice and ad-supported service problematic. Why? Because spoken results are linear, not scannable.

In Atkinson’s UI, the first answer to any request would have far more power of primacy than do the first listed answers on a Google, Yahoo!, or Bing results page. In addition, making those results ad-supported would be tough: each result could be preceded by an audio ad, but services that provided ad-free answers would, I’d argue, be more widely accepted.

But ad-free services would need to be paid for somehow, and any sponsor would have great leverage over what the first-provided answer—and likely the only one listened to—would be. If, for example, Apple provided content for its iEar conversational service, you could be sure that it would carefully vet and prioritize what its device whispered into your ear. As would Google or any other provider. Without strong consumer-protection legislation (insert rueful laughter here), content providers would give priority control to those entities that sponsored their service. And let’s not even think of how a government that was bent on controlling information would prioritize content. Are you listening, Beijing, Tehran, and Riyadh?

Atkinson’s vision of a conversational UI for mobile devices is a pretty one, but real-world considerations make me worry what it might whisper into my ear.

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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.