I think most things would be better if we abandon the GUI (except for things like games). I mean web browsing:
>Google “What is Love?”
…
0. Top Result
1. Next Result
2. Next Result

>Terminally-Incoherent.com
—Terminally Incoherent—-
—site tag here——————
Latest Entry

>Travelocity YVR > SEA
….
1. $200 Alaska Airlines
2. $400 Delta
3. $300 Air Canada
>1
How would you like to pay?
…..

I mean the internet would be so much faster, there would be less risks… you would still be able to get all the content you want to get. Sure this would never work today, but it would be good to start pushing it on our children that way it doesn’t seem so weird to them.

@ Jereme Kramer:

Wow, I haven’t really been paying attention to the brain wave interfaces, but it seems that we are further along than I thought. This is fascinating stuff.

Also, Leuthardt seems like an awesome guy! :)

@ Travis McCrea:

Yes, it was supposed to be “with our” :P

Also, what do you mean you wish. Command line UI is doing perfectly fine on the server side right now and not going anywhere for a while. While the consumer facing UI paradigms are evolving and in constant flux, the state of the art for system administration has been the same for a while now. Mostly because it just works. CLI is clean, lean and fast. Has little to no memory footprint, it lends itself to scripting and demands at least borderline competence from the user.

Something much closer to the interface you envisioned are the developing brain computer interfaces. I had the opportunity to work in the Leuthardt lab mentioned in the partially-invasive section, although my project was completely unrelated to BCI’s. Even if implanted ecog grids aren’t your taste, I witnessed some highly functional hat-like devices that with some calibration allowed lab members to play a somewhat complicated skiing game. Something interesting to check out is this page where the author hacked a sensor to fire a nerf gun based on his thoughts.

Dr. Leuthardt is generally a really cool guy. Due to his work I’ve heard several people refer to him as the world authority on mind reading. If I remember correctly, he’s in 5th place for the number of patents held in the US. He recently finished a sci-fi book due out next year called RedDevil_4 which promises to be a great read. You may be interested in his blog Brains and Machines.

” UI design is a fascinating field right now, because we are nearing a point in time when we will need to make some radical decisions with regards to the way we interact with out machines.”

Did you mean with our or without? >.> I am hoping “with our”, unless you know something I don’t. >.>

If you have ever read NetForce that’s kinda how I view our future of design, we will eventually move out of this dangerous physical world… and into a second life (sorry) which can be very much based on our thought process.

I *wish* our UI would go back to command-line like.