The computers in the movie Her don’t demand that their users sit down in front of a screen and type on a keyboard. They connect with them using voice recognition, a tiny earpiece always present in the ear, and an ultra simple handheld device. While all of these technologies are basically available in some form or other today, the movie Her is unique in its vision in that it shows how computing could some day become so omnipresent and sophisticated that it could recede into the background and only emerge when a user needs or wants it.

In that way, the future of computing UI could be a lot more like listening to music. Her Production Designer KK Barrett (who will be speaking at our Roadmap design conference next week) made this comparison in an interview in an article in Wired earlier this year, and I really liked that…