Orwell Loved Typewriters

A first: thumb tapping a blog post on to my phone.  There was no laptop available for me for this afternoon.  Normally I'd be typing something out in the back of cab, all ten fingers working away happily.  I'd reckon my full ten finger typing is, three to four times as fast. Using two thumbs it's all rather tedious as well so I need to rest more often.  I frequently consider bailing on the idea. altogether.

Will full finger typing become an anachronism in a post smart phone, intuitive dictation era?  People like me who insist on a full keyboard will winnow fewer and fewer. Who cares, I suppose. Some people, like Orwell loved typewriters and they seem monstrous and unforgiving to me.  And so the qwerty keyboard will no doubt look to someone who'll write by speaking or indeed, thinking.  

How far off is that?  I wonder as I write that.  Something that could capture thoughts and render them as text in real time. Like anything, at first they’d be crude and inaccurate and then, increasingly they’d be blisteringly accurate, hack-able, inescapable.  I've never heard of such a thing. But invariably it's being studied.  

The first iteration will probably map to mood flashes.  “I’m angry.  I’m very angry.  I’m laughing.”  But if you could sense these flashes it stands to reason that a more nuanced capacity for thought interpretation might yield to a capacity for thought capture, and thought rendering.  Perhaps monks with incomparable mind control could dupe the artificial intelligence, slowing thought to a nothingness or outwitting somehow, their own mind's voice.  But invariably they would be eclipsed by greater accuracy, power and speed, like old John Henry and the steam powered hammer.

If thoughts could be rendered in text in the moment they were conceived it would certainly be swifter by far than any typing exercise, but how the hell would you turn in off? You'd have to put it on pause to do any editing, whatsoever.   How could you signify irony?  And once thoughts were rendered, they would become "data" and if only for that second they will be "captured" in the future as all data will be backed up and archived instantaneously.  Analyzable in real time, everyone would be immediately guilty of thought crimes that could be verified and used as evidence.  

Thought capture, would be introduce a new era of immediate culpability of everyone.  Morals and policy would probably evolve too slowly to reckon with such a nightmare in time, lumbering behind the pace of innovation.  Free will might also prove an anachronism, caught in the webbing of spontaneous thought production. 

I note that I think-different when I type with two thumbs . . .