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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.
Sure sure ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It is actually quite obvious: A combination of eye tracking, voice, motion capture, and predictive AI.
clearly the answer is right in front of us, spoons will replace them!!
What a stupid question.
Nobody better touch my corsair k95 mechanical keyboard. :)
The G-keys up the side are so good for binding keys for any games or productivity and it's mechanical so that's awesome too.
I'm on the fence about interfaces that watch your hand movements. They seem like they would be prone to repeat stress injuries far worse than mouse & keys. Still waiting to see what people come up with. Perhaps a kind of malleable putty that lets you bind your own commands in it to whatever shapes or keys you come up with?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No, not really. There are times when we want to talk to people. There are times when we want to text them. There are times when we will need to write them a letter. The point is I don't always want to say something out loud. I won't want to speak to my computer. So, short of gaining the ability to read my mind, I am going to need to enter commands or data in some other non-verbal fashion. Let me know what you think that non-verbal keyboard replacement might be.
Leela, knocking on bathroom door: "Bender..... are you jacking on in there?"
It depends on the job, but in general, I'd say nothing.
Voice requires insane amounts of processing power compared to a keyboard, is lower bandwidth, and is difficult to use, except for normal words.
Try reading some C (or your language of choice -- except maybe Ada) out loud and see what you'd have to do to get the voice parser to recognize stuff as characters not words.
As to my bandwidth argument, a trained typist can easily type 60 characters per second (60 wpm), or better, whereas voice is much slower.
Not to mention the noise factor in an office, when someone would be using speech.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
...cold, dead, fingers, etc.
The GUI has "completely" replaced the command line in the last 20 years. And, yet, there are still a lot of us (very few proportionally speaking, but a lot in an absolute sense) who use the command line either as a large fraction, or even a primary way, of controlling their computers. Despite the fact that the GUI is easier to just pick up and use, the command line remains more powerful if you're willing to take them time to learn it, and makes it possible to do obscure things.
It also remains an important way of interacting with some programs where having enough GUI elements would get in the way of what the display is really supposed to do, i.e. *displaying* stuff . So, Blender, for example, is largely GUI, but probably almost everybody still hits space and types some commands every now and again.
The keyboard isn't going anywhere. Yeah, it may become less of a "primary" interface device. But we'll find that gesture-based control isn't nearly as expressive as using a mouse and a keyboard, and we'll find that having a keyboard to tune up the text that we spoke is going to be essential. (Sure, you can say "go back, respell, add a comma", etc... but it will be way more efficient just to hit a few keys and put in what you want! Hell, even when talking to *people* right now, it's sometimes more efficient to just show what you mean by typing it.)
The race to make everything a touch screen right now, in my opinion, is a kind of a mass insanity that has gripped us all. Yes, it has some advantages. But I find it far easier to get a computer to do what I want it to do with a keyboard and a mouse than with a touchscreen. And, sometimes, a touchscreen is just not a good idea. For instance, the heater/air controls on my car are all on a touchscreen now. On my older car, I can operate them entirely by feel, because the three knobs are tactile and I can tell where I'm turning them. With the touch screen, I *have* to look at them... which means looking away from the road. The touch screen is not the cure-all that device manufacturers seem to think it is. Likewise, whatever input system we use instead of a keyboard is probably going to drive a few of us nuts all the time, and will drive everybody nuts enough of the time that we'll still have a keyboard for at *least* decades to come.
Nothing will replace the computer keyboards that we know and use today.
What will happens is that computers themselves will be replaced by something else. Are smartphones and tablets "computers"? Yes and no. Are smartwatches "computers"? Yes and no.
The only things most people count as "computers" are desktops and laptops.
#DeleteFacebook
keyboards give tactile feedback. They give the ability to enter information quickly and accurately, and they do not require noise to be made (unless you have a Model M), and don't require a computer at the other end to guess what you mean. Whether the presumed successor is a gesture-based method (which the computer will get right...How often?) or the assumption is more comprehensive voice input, it requires a whole lot of computing power to turn these into reliable input and are generally inefficient.
Moreover, the piano has had the same 88-key layout for hundreds of years, and I've yet to hear anyone looking to change it.
Keyboards may not be the most exciting thing to ever exist, and I've used Siri to compose a short email on more than one occasion...but so long as there is data entry to be done that does not readily lend itself to being interpreted, keyboards will remain.
If a keyboard has the following characteristics, it is the perfect input device for me:
- mechanical Switches (blue ones, with click for me)
- heavy weight
- rubber feet
- included usb hub
- tenkeyless
This is extremely hard to get. The Keyboard 4C comes close, but the ruler at the bottom is total crap. So I am hoping for a Das Keyboard 4c+, which has just some rubber feet instead of the slippery ruler.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
The wealthy will have brain implants. The very wealthy will have "people" to do that sort of thing.
Keyboards require sophisticated language plus motor skills to operate, voice recognition still requires language skills, gesture recognition still requires motor skills.
So obviously, none of those are candidates for the upcoming brave new world in which humankind will be either pampered or enslaved by machine overlords.
The only logical successor to current input technology is whatever humans can use without requiring any training/education: Primitive vocal utterances of current emotional state (like crying or giggling), inapt touching of anything colorful, blinking, or sweet tasting.
There will be the consumers who don't need any kind of "advanced" input device. They'll happily just swipe and click wherever they are told to do so... That's essentially being click-cattle.
Those who actually work with computers already use the keyboard and will most likely use them in the foreseeable future. It's simply a local optimum and probably your only solution when you want to enter complex data and or commands. Just look at the mouse. Despite of it being around for decades now, neither one of the 2 main text editors have meaningful integration for it.
Screw you and the very leading question you rode in on. Agenda, anyone?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
... and grabbing your crotch to initiate a search for porn!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Steve Jobs presenting the MacBook Wheel. That is the future!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They think that all that stands between them and making a computer do what they want is a better interface. No, folks, that's not what we do. The hard works isn't entering stuff into a computer. Programming won't get easier if you can talk to a computer. The hardest part is figuring out what you want and formalizing that, resolving contradicting requirements and filling in the things that you didn't even think about. We'll have hard AI before computers will be able to do that. No, you won't be a Scotty once you're no longer hampered by archaic user interfaces. You're not a sculptor held back by chisel and hammer either, waiting to be freed by a better human-stone interface.
Nuff said!
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Chordite.com. I don't give a damn what they say, chording will rise again :-)
It tickles me, sort of, when people say chording is too hard for people to learn and they'll prefer surgery instead. Or that folks will want to say out loud everything they might type. Or that the folks around them would tolerate them doing that.
Can't come fast enough IMO.
The first step in any scientific thesis is the literature survey, as every PhD student knows. Not paying attention work already done will lead to reinventing the wheel and secondary papers confirming the path breaking original paper. Your paper will be counted as a mere citation and the paper will end up as the leaf node in the citation tree. So pay attention it first.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...There's a reason that PC keyboards are essentially the same today as they were 40 years ago -- THEY WORK, and they work well.
Speech to text, waving your hands around in the air and other innovations are cute, but all have massive downsides: can't be used in a noisy office, you can't keep waving your hands around in the air for hours on end.
Keyboards can be used in any environment, and are much less ambiguous than voice control. The same goes for mice -- trackballs, touchscreens, eye tracking, etc. have all been around for many years, all work reliably, yet none of them have any significant market share compared to the mouse.
I'm sure you can find some alternatives input methods in niche use cases (and for certain devices like mobile phones), but I'd still fully expect my 2040 computer to still be bundled with a boring old keyboard and mouse.
One example he gives is holding up your hand to pause a video.
What about the people without arms, you insensitive clod!
Computer keyboards will be phased out over the next 20 years
[citation needed]
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The core idea seem to be that keyboards will go away the moment when we have 'flawless' speech recognition. But guess what. Speech is a terrible computer interface. It's slow, imprecise and physically taxing to do for long periods of time. Just imagine a room filled with developer, all talking over each other trying to code using speech.
When my 25 year old Cherry Keyboard fails, I buy a new one.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is just another instance of somebody that has nothing worthwhile to say making ridiculous grande claims. Keyboards will be around for the foreseeable future.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And I'm supposed to hold up my hand to create this response, or what? And no, I do NOT want to dictate to my computer (nor do the people who live or work around me want me to do that).
Re AC and "Why is being "plugged in" dystopian?"
The voice commands and all other voices used around the input mic are getting free offers of advanced CPU power in the cloud.
Every word, comment and background noise is been sold to 3rd and 4th parties.
A cat or dog in the background? Expect cat and dog ads.
The user is the product and has to pay for all that free CPU time.
Use the wrong worlds and the mil/gov rents that user data set too.
A keyboard allows a consumer to type in what they want or not.
A live on mic thats always "listening" picks up every part of a persons existence.
Once a brain is been tracked, the ads get even more exact. What makes a person feel fun can be personalized and sent back as an ad.
That user is really going crave buying sugar water for decades.
We have seen what persistent cookies and other efforts did to browsers and the early www. The user still had some control over their computer and could wipe all data in near real time. A networked live mic just keeps on collecting all sounds, voices for years.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Computer keyboards will be phased out over the next 20 years
Oh, will they? Who's declared this? The Elders of the Internet?
Keyboards aren't going anywhere, certainly not within 20 years.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Fuckin' nothing!"
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The total number of people using computers will continue to rise dramatically, so that the percentage of people using keyboards will continue to fall over time. But the core set of people who were using keyboard for functional reasons will continue to use keyboards. For instance, programmers, or writers, or people who use spreadsheets, etc.
So the question is not "What will replace keyboards", the question is "What will people use computers for?" If they're using computers for virtual reality, then goggles probably _are_ the way to go. But just because a lot of people are using computers for virtual reality doesn't mean that people have to use virtual reality for other tasks.
This comes from the same strain of short-sightedness which leads to phrases like "iPhone killer" and "email killer". I have more confidence that I'll still be using email in 20 years than that I'll still have to drive my car.
Worse, chances are I'll still be using a keyboard to write something which looks a lot like C++ code.
off directly into a computer!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
The future of keyboards is VR.
We will log into a VR system, sit down at a virtual desk and keyboard, and type away.
which have been phased out by now. Ever heard of muscle memory???
Based on history, worse computer keyboards.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It would have to be some completely new technology. Nothing else we have right now can replace a keyboard because it has a very specific function and is very very good at that.
What else do we have and how does it compare to a keyboard?
- replacing a physical keyboard with one pictured on a touchscreen: horrible for typing long text documents. Ergonomic disaster unless you put the screen right where you would have a physical keyboard (flat on your table). Same for similar stuff like those "project a keyboard on your desk with a laser" solutions, This is pretty much "replacing a keyboard with something which is used the same way, but it is just worse at being a keyboard".
- voice input: gets very tiring after a while (anybody who has a job which involves talking all day long knows this). Slower than just typing, especially if you have to correct something when the computer misunderstands you. Formatting text / putting it where you want on the screen (e.g spreadsheets) is difficult. I can only see this as a good solution when you need to input text but your hands are not free (e.g. dictating a text message while driving your car). Also, who wants to work in an office where everybody is talking all the time. That's just annoying - plus there are the obvious privacy problems. Plus technical issues which need to be solved (voice recognition when there are dozens other people talking at the same time).
- using eye tracking / brain wave stuff (electrodes, whatever): too slow, too inaccurate. Also probably tiring. Why track eye movement when we have ten fingers which can just press a button. Also probably only a niche solution for when you cannot use your hands.
- plugging a cable into your brain and just thinking the text: that's just science fiction and probably at least a hundred years away.
The only decent alternative solution is voice recognition, but even that has obvious flaws - the main one being that it is not a good solution for an office setting.
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
Real pythons are a good bit faster and more accurate (and if well trained probably write PHP natively).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Speech was the first communication device, ~200k years ago. Then came stylii and reed-pens ~4000 years ago and typewriters ~150 years ago. All have been improved (language precision, steel nibs 1815, electronics) but all are still around and used as appropriate.
A better keyboard..
"they jack directly into computers" - I guess Apple is going to sell another dongle for headphones.
You can use array mics, or boom mics, to cut down on noise in an office environment, but every other criticism is spot on.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Speech recognition is nice until you fail to notice the added text by your cubicle next door neighbor. I had this issue at home in my home office when my roommate would come in an utter the words my mac recognized as the shutdown command. Pretty annoying, and not an uncommon experience 20 years ago. And handwriting ??? We stopped teaching cursive in many schools, and even with cursive, I type faster.
So my future preferred input method is thoughts. "Think it. Compile it. Run it."(tm)
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
"Computer keyboards will be phased out over the next 20 years..."
Who is saying this, on what authority?
-Styopa
When TV came out, it was widely predicted that it would replace radio. Obviously, it didn't, but it did change the way we use radio. Before TV, people regularly listened to radio shows, glued to the set to hear the end of the story. Now, radio has become more of a background music device, or a medium for talk shows, while TV has taken over the story-telling role.
Sure, there will be input methods that replace some of what keyboards now do: touch screen input, voice input, mouse input, and so on. But none of these replace what can be done with a keyboard. They each fill a niche.
The phone and tablet DID replace the desktop computer for many households, but the computer isn't going anywhere. Neither is the keyboard.
Email? What's that? (say these people, who probably use their thumbs to text, but think of email the same way I think of postage stamps)
Software? Not many people write software. I do, and maybe you do, but most people don't.
Games? I suspect that many games will become voice actuated (all the more reason to make young men live in the basement), plus other kinds of interfaces. (How do you aim a gun with your keyboard?) Except for a few diehards, I imagine the days of "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" are long over. (That said, I haven't played computer games since the last time I played Flight Simulator, probably well over a decade ago. So I could be wrong...)
Now I too think keyboards will remain relevant for at least some kinds of work (including mine, computational linguistics). But for people who do nothing more than websurf, play games, and text--which I'm guessing is the majority of the population--keyboards may go the way of the typewriter.
"I remember only about a decade ago being amazed the first time I opened a computer's BIOS... Press PgUp to go to the previous tab... press PgDn to go to the next tab, press ESC to exit without saving changes... Ah, the good old days." Son, in the Good Old Days, we set the boot sequence with toggle switches. This topic actually came up last week on /. I'm proud to say that I really did work on such a computer once, a Cyber 170/750. There's a picture of a similar "deadstart panel" (for a different Cyber computer) here: https://www.eetimes.com/docume...
http://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/...
This thing is awesome. And no, I don't have an Amazon Affiliate page. Replacing the keyboard is probably an idea by the same asshats who replaced the Firefox classic UI with the Atrocious ^H^H^H^H^H^H Australis UI.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Are these the same guys who announce the end-of-email every few years?
Batteries and wires. Then you can type ALL you want without moving a muscle.
Of course you won't have the will to type anything, but that's besides the point.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Yes, yes, we're in a dystopian nightmare! That explains everything!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
When you start screwing your computer... and your computer starts screwing you... I doubt too many people will use their computers as much.
I'm more worried about people won't use their people as much.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I could tell if the comp was stuck in a loop by looking at the blinkenlights. Simple, natch. Seeing if the damn thing was booting correctly took a bit more stutz.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
It is taking a paradigm shift to get the steering wheel out of the car. Self-driving may finally eliminate the traditional interfaces. But I still bet it will have buttons.
Yes. I expect it will have a keyboard.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Oh, the joy of a positive feedback! And if you're going to go with a non-standard key, make it a BIG key, right above the Enter!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
What he says makes no sense. We've moved to a culture where we text more and talk less, and it's natural because it provides privacy and doesn't require us to consider the noise levels around (or contribute to it). So for most people the replacement to a physical keyboard is a touch keyboard, but that's about it. Mind typing, if it works, will be an improvement, so will catch on, but talking to devices? That's a step back. The problem with trying to predict a future based on what you don't want to happen is that it's illogical.
Desktop computers in general will continue a long, gradual decline over the next couple of decades as people find it easier and more convenient to use mobile devices instead.
Desktop computers will retain their usefulness mostly for work purposes. Even though many work functions will become quicker and easier on mobile, I can't see the keyboard or the desktop going away for any purpose that requires a noticeable amount of writing or programming. Especially programming.
But it may be pretty rare for people to bother with PCs in their homes in ten or twenty years.
... and until then probably nothing else.
Speaking uses 80% brain power, typing use 20%, roughly. Typing is pretty fast and efficient. Talking won't replace it entirely.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What will replace idiotic tech journalists who think that keyboards, which have been around for hundreds of years and are used by billions of people around the world, will be phased out in the next 20 years?
I'm as pessimistic about the future as just about anyone else, but even I don't think the future will be filled with dumbasses who only communicate through emojis and can't read or write.
If it is autoimmune then a diet like the autoimmune protocol probably would help, but good luck finding a doctor to tell you that. IME they all try to put you on immunosuppressives. Also if the Arthritis is just worn through cartilage, there is no diet to grow it back that I have heard.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
What more do you need? What could be better?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Keyboards are very human interfaces: we invented them because we have fingers. Aside from a theremin, what other musical instruments do you play without some digital manipulation (keys, holes, strings, etc.)? Keyboards for text are super efficient like piano and organ keyboards are for discrete and chorded inputs. When speech recognition is much better someday, perhaps we will use gestures and drawing in conjunction with speech.
I am guessing our cubicles then will be one-way glass domes with a barstool in the middle. My login passphrase will be "Klingon mummification glyph" to go with the breath scan.
Stupid articles will be phased out and eliminated 20 years from now, too!
(Actually, that's more likely!)
Meanwhile, it's been 8 years since Apple got rid of keyboards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You worked on one of those machines? You must be an old coot, like me...
[citation needed]
pc gaming REQUIRES KEYBOARDS IDIOT
this parent post brought to you by the makers of stupid consoles and in association with your favorite 3 letter govt org for CONTROL of the future
just fuck off with retarded crap
You do know you can attach a Xbox controller to the PC and play games without a keyboard, don't you?
NRRPT/RCT
You can have my keyboard and my mouse when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Between the NSA, FaceBook, and Cortana, there will be no need for keyboards.
By combining predictive text technologies with routine snooping on every detail of our private lives, not only typing, but actual, human-to-human conversation will be rendered obsolete.
This will turn out to be a good thing; not having to bother with the tedious task of composition, everyone will have more time to stare at their Wall.
I miss the days when the only other person that truly knew what was inside my head was Santa Claus.
So, they can't master typing? Reminds me of the seventies and eighties, when Managers Didn't Type, like, that was for lowly secretaries.
And if you want to do something other than wave your hands to decide what some marketer thinks should be presented to, well, that's also *so* lowbrow and caveman....
Toggle the switches, baby!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain