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My son Jon had a good one for me this week. He was hugging our blue poodle Beau, who is especially blue after a bad brush last week with a minivan -- his left foreleg is in a cast, and it hurts.

And Jon, 10, turned to me and asked, "Dad, what will dogs be like in the future?"

My first reaction to questions like this, is to snicker and belittle them. Dogs are an immutable form. Their very essence is their unchangingness. The very name "Fido" means just that: faithful.

But this one got me going. Dogs are not really faithful, in the sense of never changing. The oldest breeds, like the mastiff and greyhound, are only a few thousand years old. All the rest were created in the last couple of centuries.

Dogs are inventions, constantly being tinkered with, constantly yielding up new, improved versions. Of course dogs will be different in the future -- but how?

The problem reminded me of a phrase I had penciled on my to-do list for over five years: the virtual dog. The idea was to ask what a technological dog would be like? This was before the tamagotchi craze put little digital pets in every kid's pencil bag, until they grew tired of it, and it "died."

(They really did die if you forgot about them, presumably from broken hearts. And you didn't care less if they died or not -- great training for owners of real pets.)

My bias was that a techno-dog would always be a pale imitation of the real thing. Like the mechanical bird in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor and the Nightingale," it could never sing as sweetly as the flesh-and-blood bird, whose cries arose from the sufferings of the world.

But Jon was getting at something different -- how would real dogs change? Specifically, he wanted to know if they would be able to talk.

Scientists have taught chimpanzees and gorillas to speak in sign. There was a breathtaking moment twenty-some years ago when a chimp combined two sign-words, water and bird, to create its own new word, duck. Could the family dog share in this glory?

Not having hands, sign language for dogs is probably out. But imagine implanting sensors in the dog's brain, digestive tract, and bloodstream, that are alert to enzymatic changes in the dog's metabolism. Connect these sensors to a voice synthesizer with a very modest vocabulary, and you have a talking dog.

What would the dog say? At first, it would be quite primitive, speaking in a kind of canine pidjin, addressing the animal's most basic needs. Imagine a robotic computer voice like the one in your car coming from a speaker built into the dog's collar, saying things like:

"The dog is dehydrated. Please refill the water bowl."

As the technology evolves, expect the voice to become warmer, and the grammar to become more subtle. Eventually, it may be possible to transmit brain messages from the cerebral (thinking) cortex and limbic (emotional) systems directly to voice. Owners can choose between anthropomorphic translation and non-anthropomorphic:

"Welcome home, oh perfect master. How my heart sings to see you!"

"It would be bad if I killed you right now. Bad!"

Even the voice will be programmable. Using sound samplings, your dog could talk like Sinatra (if he's a howler), or Madonna (if it's very affectionate) or (if he has problems with territoriality) Hitler. My guess is that a lot of people will want their dog to talk just like Goofy, complete with hyuks.

You will learn your dog's opinions and insights you could only guess at previously:

"Warning: we are beset by demons and malefactors on all sides."

"Sweet feces of cat!"

The challenge of the talking dog will be to let it express itself in a way that is still dogly.

Most people will opt for the talking dog. People who do not will be considered hottentots, antediluvian, a little inhumane, even. How will they know what's wrong with their pet, unless it tells them?

But you know what? As I kneel alongside Jonnie, stroking Beauregard, who lies suffering silently with a red leg-splint running up his shoulder, and an aluminum pin connecting his broken bone, his eyes expressing both his misery and his patience --

I think I will be one of them.

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