In 1987, you helped develop the concept for Knowledge Navigator, which many have compared to Siri. What do you imagine the Knowledge Navigator of, say, 2030 looking like?

I suspect in that era it will be less about a product you pick up and hold in your hand like smartphone. It’ll be much more about you being personally connected to a system where things happening passively. We’ve been going through this active stage where you have to tap a screen, speak to a computer, or look at screen, and we’re so conditioned that that’s what computing is about. But we may soon be in an era where you don’t do anything, but there’ll be tech around you monitoring your health, making judgments about what it believes you like and protecting your safety.

You're presently working with several health care startups. What do you foresee will be the biggest change that tech catalyzes in the world of medicine?

The change will be even bigger than what we've seen with online banking or e-commerce. Health care missed the PC and Internet revolutions, but it can’t afford to miss the cloud and mobile revolution.

Sensors are at the early days of what they’ll be able to do. You're going to be able to track anything you can think of from a health standpoint. If you're driving a car, it will be totally practical in the next 5 to 10 years that you'll be able to evaluate someone’s health conditions just by monitoring them as they ride around in the car.

There will be major, big-brand consumer health services that will become institutions that everyone takes for granted. I'm confident that in health care we'll see consumer-branded institutions every bit as big as Walmart or McDonald's, but this time focused on health and wellness instead of selling products.

The Knowledge Navigator is a concept described by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley in his 1987 book, Odyssey. It describes a device that can access a large networked database of hypertextinformation, and use software agents to assist searching for information.

Apple produced several concept videos showcasing the idea. All of them featured a tablet style computer with numerous advanced capabilities, including an excellent text-to-speech system with no hint of "computerese", a gesture based interface resembling the multitouch interface later used on the iPhone and an equally powerful speech understanding system, allowing the user to converse with the system via an animated "butler" as the software agent.

In one vignette a university professor returns home and turns on his computer, in the form of a tablet the size of a large-format book. The agent is a bow-tie wearing butler who appears on the screen and informs him that he has several calls waiting. He ignores most of these, from his mother, and instead uses the system to compile data for a talk on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. While he is doing this, the computer informs him that a colleague is calling, and they then exchange data through their machines while holding a video based conversation.

In another such video, a young student uses a smaller handheld version of the system to prompt him while he gives a class presentation on volcanoes, eventually sending a movie of an exploding volcano to the video "blackboard". In a final installment a user scans in a newspaper by placing it on the screen of the full-sized version, and then has it help him learn to read by listening to him read the scanned results, and prompting when he pauses.