The '80s was an era of human-machine interaction - PCs, portables, car phones, Game Boys. The '90s will be an era of human-human and machine- machine interaction.
Human-Human: People will begin to apply knowledge gained from the study of human-machine interaction to human-human dialog. People will begin using restricted conversational handshake techniques to get their messages across in a concise and explicit way. (This is the opposite of how Camille Paglia communicates. She needs an information filter around her.)
Machine-Machine: People will stop looking at the benefits of direct interaction with a computer and start looking at its pitfalls and displeasures. Background processing - the stuff that mainframe computers do well - will resurface. Look for intelligent boxes on the network that don't have keyboards or displays but do have lots of network cards in them, run case-based reasoning software, and require little more than parts replacement and a continuous power supply to keep going. Look for expert boxes that can complete almost all accounting tasks without CPA interaction until the final output is ready. Look for people to gain status by taking PCs off their desks and saying: "My computer works for me, I don't work on my computer."
