Nearly every time I see a Powerpoint presentation, it is filled with bar charts. Bar charts seem to be the lingua franca of conveying information to a group in presentation form.
Clearly bar charts appealing to both presenter and audience. They convey essential information in a bold graphical form, they show trends in a way that is easy for the eye to follow, and they abstract away details the neither presenter nor audience cares about in the moment.
There will come a time when the visual equivalent of ChatGPT or Bard will make bar charts for us on the spot. We will be discussing some topic, and one person will say “You know, there’s been an increase in … over the last decade,” or “The number of women enrolling at MIT recently, compared with the number of women at NYU, has been …”
At that moment, a bar chart can optionally pop up in the view of both people, presumably mediated by our smart glasses. We probably won’t even think much about it, other than to wonder how anybody ever explained anybody before we all had conversational bar charts.