Well, who knows what it could look like, eh? But quoting from this article about the past, here’s maybe an idea:

Predicting the future is a risky business.
Even visionaries turn conservative when facing that challenge. But the four winners of this year’s Draper Prize from the US National Academy of Engineering are as qualified for the task as anyone.
Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Charles “Chuck” Thacker and Butler Lampson were recently honoured for their groundbreaking research at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in California 30 years ago. Among their accomplishments: accurately envisioning the office of the future that most of us now use daily.
The four winners shared with PC World their views on the future of computing.

Only the beginning
“The computer revolution has only just begun,” Lampson says.
The four expect that several hot areas of research and innovation will become even more important when combined: wireless technologies, ever-higher-speed communications, speech recognition, improved search engines, and management of huge volumes of related information. These segments’ total impact could be much larger than the sum of their parts.
“I think wireless will make a fundamental difference in the way people use computers … this will cause a wide variety of new devices to appear,” says Thacker, who worked with Lampson on Microsoft’s Tablet PC designs.
Tired of your PC’s messy, pesky cables? The solution may be wireless. “I think that short-range wireless will take over for nearly all connections between computers and peripherals, because it’s much more convenient,” Lampson says.

Next step: PCs fall apart
Look for the traditional PC – keyboard, screen, hard disk, network adapter — to become “disaggregated”. The pioneers expect that the components will become separated but will continue to work together. Many computer research groups at universities, and at private and corporate labs, are working on this assumption.
As wireless access becomes common and cheap, as chips and communications get faster, and as prices continue to drop, there is less reason to tie a disk to a keyboard and screen. The network will be everywhere, both wired and wireless.
A PC’s screen could also become whichever display device is closest. Current research includes such examples as flashing advertising panels in the supermarket checkout line. Or you may pause to check data on an office hallway’s video wall that displays a computer’s output using special electronic paints already in development. Another future display in the works is a laser-powered holographic system that shows text and video in the air using tiny programmable actuator chips called MEMS (micro electromechanical systems, already used in many commercial products). Or the display you use might be a piece of electronic paper that you crumple when you’re through.
Input and control could be via a wireless keyboard, a handwriting-recognition device, or an array of microphones embedded in the surface of your desk or your car’s dashboard. With voice recognition technology, such input devices are always listening for you to “wake up” the computer.

Embed and spread
Fundamentally, most computers may simply vanish from view, either through disaggregation or by becoming embedded into walls, appliances and even your clothes – or a combination.
“Although putting computers into things like toasters and refrigerators seems a little silly today, it is becoming increasingly less silly,” says Thacker. Indeed, some consumer electronics stores already sell early versions of computerised appliances.
Cars already have dozens or hundreds of computers built into them to control everything from the steering wheel’s angle to the DVD player, as well as to monitor petrol consumption or to power the wheels, brakes and suspension. Lampson wants to see that go a giant step further. He envisions cars that drive themselves, primarily for safety reasons.
Meanwhile, expect the way you get your telephone service to change, especially with the advent of voice over internet protocol (VoIP). The hold-up is the so-called last-mile problem: the expense of rewiring that last few hundred metres from the network in the street up to your door.

Qwerty talk
Also still early is speech-recognition technology. A number of products are out, but the technology is less effective when tasks are complex, such as correctly recognising and responding to voice commands. Even relatively simple speech dictation usually requires positioning a microphone near the mouth to cancel extraneous noise.
“The larger problem of speech [is that it] requires human-style commonsense reasoning to be pretty well done by machine,” Kay says. “I can’t think of any good reason why this won’t happen. It’s just a difficult problem to [deal with] outside of restricted contexts.”
Lampson concurs: “Getting the computer to understand what you say to it and behave intelligently is an entirely different matter” from speech recognition.

Self-aware computers
Even after 60 years of development, computers are still basically machines that can only crunch an endless stream of ones and zeros. Although several research projects are focusing on imbuing computers with reasoning and decision-making cognition – one has been under way for 20 years – that remains a holy grail for computer science.

I believe the children are the future
“I don’t think anything really important has happened yet,” Kay says. He predicts that changes will come as computing “co-evolves with the users, especially children, until a new kind of fluency will be able to happen. And then, those after us will see some big changes.”

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