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What Will Replace Computer Keyboards? (xconomy.com)
jeffengel writes:Computer keyboards will be phased out over the next 20 years, and we should think carefully about what replaces them as the dominant mode of communicating with machines, argues Android co-founder Rich Miner. Virtual reality technology and brain-computer links -- whose advocates include Elon Musk -- could lead to a "dystopian" future where people live their lives inside of goggles, or they jack directly into computers and become completely "de-personalized," Miner worries.
He takes a more "humanistic" view of the future of human-machine interfaces, one that frees us to be more expressive and requires computers to communicate on our level, not the other way around. That means software that can understand our speech, facial expressions, gestures, and handwriting. These technologies already exist, but have a lot of room for improvement.
One example he gives is holding up your hand to pause a video.
He takes a more "humanistic" view of the future of human-machine interfaces, one that frees us to be more expressive and requires computers to communicate on our level, not the other way around. That means software that can understand our speech, facial expressions, gestures, and handwriting. These technologies already exist, but have a lot of room for improvement.
One example he gives is holding up your hand to pause a video.
What a stupid question.
What Will Replace Computer Keyboards?
Question is: Do they *need* to be replaced? If so, why?
There is only one relevant factor for computer interaction:
bandwidth.
I can type 500 characters per minute on my G80-3000 cherry keyboard with an error rate less than 1% thus producing highly complex content faster than some people can speak or listen. Also I can read text at a speed of 5000 characters per minute allowing me to consume highly complex content faster than any person alive can speak or listen. In fact I HATE youtube videos because they often need ten or twentyfold the time it takes me to read the same content from text.
Give me something which allows me to interact even faster and you got me as a customer.
But honestly I think there isn't anything close to accomplish that. Maybe we'll see direct brain links in a couple of decades but I can not even remotely imagine anything else increasing my performance.
But if your problem is not "efficency" but "made for idiots" then there might be something around the corner. Which I am not even remotely interested in.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Exactly. Answer: probably nothing. What is millennial Silicon Valley's obsession with 'replacing' things? I'm sorry all of the good concepts were already taken when you were born and all you get are incremental improvements, but 'disruption' for its own sake quickly becomes arrogance quickly becomes supremely annoying quickly becomes a dead end. The best sci-fi and speculative fiction was about solving problems that actually existed at the time, and not about manufacturing them.