how will you input data?

[cardfan]

I am sure that you don't. The young believe that the world has always been as they found it and that it will always be that way. That is why you need the old.

When was the last time you saw anyone use a typewriter? Dictate a letter, except in the movies?

There is a scene in the movie Chariots of Fire, set in 1920, in which one of the athletes apologizes in a letter to his parents that he had neglected his shorthand to pursue his sport. Do you know anyone who can take shorthand, much less any elite college student that studies it?

At the 1964 World's Fair, IBM demonstrated a machine that could recognize numbers, even carefully hand written ones. It was a marvel for demonstrating at a fair. The most imaginative of those in audience could not have foreseen TWAIN, much less $100- scanners.

Think of how much different the current iPhone is from the one introduced just three and a half years ago. Imagine what the last iPad will look like.

The generation before mine dictated; a few composed on yellow pads. I am sure that, while you can read the words, you cannot really appreciate what that means. In part it means that they could not compose at a keyboard as you and I do. Their brains did not work that way.

While I can speak to large audiences in coherent sentences and paragraphs, I cannot dictate. My brain does not work that way.

Dragon is only a decade or so old. Try to imagine what speech to text will be like in a generation. It will wean us away from the keyboard.

You can trust me when I tell you (I have no reason to mislead you) that a generation that literally cut its teeth on the iPod Touch and the DSLite, and grew up with Air Books and iPads will be different from you when they grow up. I know that you cannot "see it happening," though it is happening under your nose, any more than you can see grass grow, but it happens nonetheless.

I think you're going off on a tangent. You mentioned voice replacing keyboard input. I don't see it happening. It has nothing to do with a generation growing up on ipods/ipads and how they'll be different or how we used to use typewriters (I learned to type on one). Or how young i may be (i like to think 40 is young..)

I'm not a developer but i did take quite a few CIS courses for my MBA. Professors there were quite adamant that voice recognition will be a huge hurdle if not impossible.

Take your Dragon app for instance. Other than short phrases, you could never hope to use it to write anything substantial without having to go back and edit it..with a keyboard. This, after how many years you said? You will always need that keyboard.

http://www.prosperstreet.com/spf.pdf

From the Desk of David Pogue - Readers Share Software Mishaps - NYTimes.com

 

[whmurray]

I think you're going off on a tangent. You mentioned voice replacing keyboard input. I don't see it happening. It has nothing to do with a generation growing up on ipods/ipads and how they'll be different or how we used to use typewriters (I learned to type on one). Or how young i may be (i like to think 40 is young..)

I'm not a developer but i did take quite a few CIS courses for my MBA. Professors there were quite adamant that voice recognition will be a huge hurdle if not impossible.

Take your Dragon app for instance. Other than short phrases, you could never hope to use it to write anything substantial without having to go back and edit it..with a keyboard. This, after how many years you said? You will always need that keyboard.

http://www.prosperstreet.com/spf.pdf

From the Desk of David Pogue - Readers Share Software Mishaps - NYTimes.com

At only forty, you will live long enough to see the impossible. Read The Age of the Spiritual Machine by Ray Kurzweil.

No one listens to me anyway. I have an attitude.

 

[Readover]

I got six words for you guys: With wires in my cerebral cortex

 

[BriDroid]

I got six words for you guys: With wires in my cerebral cortex

The only way keyboards could be completely replaced -- thoughtType.

 

[Readover]

The only way keyboards could be completely replaced -- thoughtType.

The Write-iThink

 

[Lady Kaede]

@whmurray, as a fellow geezer, I do think you overstate your case in two ways. First, the keyboard did not eliminate the pen any more than voice recognition will eliminate the keyboard; what characterizes our age is the accelerating and increasing multiplicity of ways, means, things, events, people . . . But, second, no one can predict the future, and to insist that this ever-blossoming pace of change and innovation will continue through the lifetimes of the young is to tempt the fates and invite error.

 

[whmurray]

@whmurray, as a fellow geezer, I do think you overstate your case in two ways. First, the keyboard did not eliminate the pen any more than voice recognition will eliminate the keyboard; what characterizes our age is the accelerating and increasing multiplicity of ways, means, things, events, people . . . But, second, no one can predict the future, and to insist that this ever-blossoming pace of change and innovation will continue through the lifetimes of the young is to tempt the fates and invite error.

Touche', Madame, Touche'.