I can give a basic example of why chat-based UI will not dominate.
Let's say I want to change a setting that uses a traditional radio button UI:
- Autoscale servers
- Manual scale servers
It's much easier to discover, understand the options, and make a decision via a radio button UI than to ask for my options via chat. That would look like:
"I'm having load issues on my servers. Can you increase the server capacity?"
"Sure! Do you want to autoscale or manual scale?"
"What's the difference? Are those the only two options or are there more?"
"There are only these 2 options. The difference is..."
But it's not either/or. There's nothing that says you can't have a visual interface that adjusts based on both natural language feedback and traditional cursor-based input.
There are great examples of this in Westworld and The Expanse, with characters talking to screens to update and refine their queries.
Identity online should be optional. If you read comments on a news story about an upcoming election in your country, you should see some that are verifiably a human citizen from your country, separate from everything else. Pay attention to everything else at your discretion.
I think a web that is half identified and half anonymous would work well.
In organization chart data, there are people with cute names (John, Jane) and there are positions with descriptive names (Head of Product, Head of Sales).
People's responsibilities change but their cute name does not. But you might not know everyone's cute name, and you want to know who to talk to when something was sold that can't be fulfilled. So you look up Head of Sales in the org chart.
Perhaps having two names is what is needed as in organization charts.
I find it interesting how people always judge products based on their v1.
Yes it has flaws, but early adopters will put up with it, and future iterations will be much better. I think we need to ask ourselves whether, if some things improved, this is a good idea.