Visual and voice communication would be needed but I think local hardware, an OS in particular "windows" and most productivity applications would become pointless if AGI and especially ASI take over. I mean why would you need a window to launch different applications like showing you excel if you can just ask your assistant (who is more clever than you if ASI) to perform the tasks and just show you the relevant info through a display? You wouldnt need to navigate an OS to perform tasks at all because it would be doing it and just displaying information that you might not even need anymore. The single display app or browser could show you things from the cloud and be just as competent as the local "OS". Then you've got to ask what is an OS anymore, I wouldn't need file management and folders, I wouldn't need to be presented a list of applications to launch, I wouldn't click on a gmail or outlook icon to show me a list of emails, I wouldn't need a calendar if the ASI is my personal assistant I simply talk to. What tasks would I be performing in the OS UI myself? That's the whole point I believe, I would be giving up agency to the "agent" and not need to perform tasks myself. Some even tried AI interfaces without a screen in the past with the Humane Ai Pin but this is before AGI/ASI. Wear some Google Glass like device and just ask it to do everything/show things without you needing to actually perform anything in what you would consider an "OS" UI today. You wouldn't need to operate anything if it's agentic. It would all just be data accessed and consumed on the cloud and no actual tasks to perform in a UI.
You are right in the sense that a list of applications and such wouldn't be needed but even if every single compute task is done in the cloud, you still need a way to interface with it locally. It is still an OS because by definition an OS is the interface humans use to interact with computers and digital devices, regardless of where that processing is done.
Yes, you can ask "tell me what NASDAQ is today" but if you want to see a trend you won't want it to just tell you "On the first quarter of 2023 it was, on the second quarter was, then went up to during the third quarter, then it took a dip". For this, you might actually want to look at a chart. There are several scenarios (not just Q&A) that require information to be displayed for human consumption because that's the way we as humans work. What a very capable AI would save you from is having to open a browser, typing "
www.google.com" or whatever and then type the information you want to see. Even more so if the kind of data you are looking for might reside in different systems. So for example, you could ask it "give me a comparison of how my investments have performend year to date compared to NASDAQ". This would require you to pull information from your portfolio, put it in Excel or whatever and do the same with NASDAQ from another source (as right now you wouldn't normally find that precise comparison by default in your own investment porffolio at a glance).
It wouldn't be Windows in it's current form for sure but what Microsoft might be doing is striving to be that universal interface and so far they are the closest to getting there thanks to their market penetration and because they have been investing heavily in AI for a while. You are right about different ways to display this information (the end game would be to have it injected directly into your brain through something like neural link) but even just interface to interact with the AI layer (which would orchrestate many different underlying systems) would be an OS.
Now, while that stuff is a reality there are many steps in between that require Windows as it is right now and AI in the presentation we have today (LLM's/Agentic AI). Copilot right now is pretty crappy but it's slowly getting there and at some point not too far into the future it will make having to interact with OS in the way we currently do obsolete.
It's not for everyone, that's for sure. For example I prefer reading than listening because I can read faster so I would still want to see my E-Mail list but there are people that probably prefer to listen to their E-Mails.
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