Hunt and Peck

My penmanship is bad.
Always has been bad. I scribbled my way through school and only when I lived abroad and wrote regular letters to my fiancé did my cursive take on any kind of recognizable form. Throughout that time I really wished I could write better. Neater.

When was exposed to a typewriter I became a decent hunt and peck typist and while that place an upper limit on how fast I could get, the two finger method was perfect training for the two thumb approach that is required for a smartphone. So when the age of the smart phone dawned, I was "sorted".

To make matters worse, my siblings and I suffer from an odd sort of dyslexia where we can tell if a word is misspelled, but even words that we use it all the time and up wrong.

This too was addressed by the new world we found ourselves in.

Spell check became our friend and in time we even forgot that we were ever afflicted.

It still takes me longer to type and I always end up feeling like my words are running ahead of my ability to capture them, and this is often frustrating.

To this end, I explore new ways to type every few months.

When I first got my first iPhone I was very disappointed that what came up was absolute rubbish. And in time I learned to just type and let autocorrect do its thing. (often with hilarious results) when I went to Android I installed SwiftKey and it was like magic. The Ai seemed to know what I wanted to say almost before I did, and was really fast.

SwiftKey went through many iterations and often I felt it was getting dumber and I trudged through the garbage, and then it was smart again. But I never got over the need to improve my speed, just so my writing could keep up with my words.

It made sense that Google would make a better keyboard than Microsoft (SwiftKey) so I went back to gboard (Google) regularly and when it failed me, back to SwiftKey. All the time feeling that I was missing something. While voice dictation was getting progressively better I didn't see that as a day to day solution for me.

While I hunt and peck on a computer, I realise that touch typing is the way to go. The blind typing technique was clearly the better way. 

On a smartphone I found myself envying young people who had learned to Swype. Instead of pecking at the letters, one glides the thumb of one hand over the letters and it's meant to be faster. Much faster. 

Once again I was faced with the fact that I knew what the better method was, but I was too far gone in the wrong direction to unlearn and relearn the better method. 

Again a day late and a dollar short.

It's actually not too bad when I am writing notes or into my diary as the extra time that it takes forces me to think and reflect on my writing. On social media when feverishly trying to keep up my end of a heated discussion, however, I am often very frustrated by my inability to type fast. Every time I try to swipe, I end up going back to hunt and peck when I am in the middle of a conversation.

I do believe that in the future this problem will be solved by technology.

Just as my poor penmanship and even worse spelling has become irrelevant, the way that my two finger hunt and peck typing had become the method of choice on a smartphone some new technology will make our current concerns and limitations, irrelevant. All of this in a way that we cannot possibly predict today.

I hear your skepticism. What new technology could replace typing, in such a way that we would not be able to even grasp the concept?

Let me propose two such oddball ideas.

Brain interface. 
There might be no need to actually type at all, if the computer of the future could, in some way read my thoughts.

Alternatively, perhaps, it won't need to read my thoughts if it's able to predict them. 

Yes, I am referring to Ai and possibly its being able to predict each thought, from the preceding one, almost before they are even formed in my head.

Sounds like crazy shit, but maybe one needs to be open to all possibilities. After all, we are living in the time of crazy tech and almost anything is possible. 

Just look how far we have come already.

M Parak
Sept 2018 Maputo