RIP, Computer Keyboard

Coming soon to an office near you: Smart technologies that will supercharge our productivity – and make some ubiquitous tools obsolete.

My kids came home the other day with what seemed to them a perfectly innocent request. “We’d like to learn touch typing.”

So imagine their surprise when I replied, “Don’t bother.”

It’s not that I don’t want them to be able to type proficiently. It’s just that I don’t see much of a future in keyboards – and especially in the business world they’ll soon be joining.

For the past four decades or so, we’ve been living in what’s been called the “computer age”. It’s promised to free us from time-consuming manual office work, thus making us far more efficient and productive. To a large extent, it’s done just that. Does anyone really want to go back to the days of working by using pens, paper, typewriters, adding machines and slide rules?

Despite remarkable advances in computing power, the computer age hasn’t delivered the immense productivity gains many expected, especially compared to other seismic shifts, such as the industrial age. This has been called the “productivity paradox”. It’s a phenomenon that was summed up nicely by Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, when he noted: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

There are a lot of theories about why the paradox exists – or if it even does – so I’d like to add my own. Perhaps the reason additional technology doesn’t necessarily make us more productive is because the systems we’ve invested in haven’t been intelligent.

Instead, they require our guidance. When we need a task performed, we need to instruct our systems what, when and how to do it. Plus they’re inflexible; they require us to adapt to how they work, rather than them adapting to how we work. Anyone who’s struggled to learn brand-new hardware or software – which is just about everyone – can relate. The fact that you had to master it at all is a symbol of the problem.

Goodbye Computer Age, Hello Smart Computer Age

The good news is that we may be on the verge of overcoming the productivity paradox. We’re entering what I like to call the “smart computer age” – a world in which intelligent office tools will help us achieve that desired state of working far more quickly and efficiently.

As smart tools, they’ll continually learn more about us and how we work, rather than us having to get to know them. They’ll anticipate our needs and act more like humans and less like machines. They won’t take over what we do, “Terminator”-style, but instead enable and augment our work efforts.

These technologies will harness perhaps the most powerful tool ever devised: our human voice. Which brings me back to typing and computer keyboards. The keyboard is the perfect example of a tool that will be rendered obsolete by new smart technologies. As the intermediary between our thoughts and actions, the keyboard is inefficient. That’s because our fingers can’t type nearly as fast as the human brain can think.

Our new tools, likely ones in wearable form, will bridge that gap and begin breaking down the productivity paradox. In addition to anticipating our needs and proactively providing the information we need, they’ll understand and respond instantly to voice commands, easily translating our thoughts into actions faster and more precisely than today.

That means the impending smart computer age will make computer keyboards – and other tools we take for granted – obsolete in the same way the previous computer age rendered typewriters obsolete.

Sorry, kids.