Is typing still an important skill in the AI age?
A much-discussed article in The Wall Street Journal, “Gen Z-ers are computer whizzes. Just don’t ask them to type”, highlights many young people’s inability to use a keyboard properly, which seems counterintuitive among a generation born and brought up in the digital age.
How concerned should we be that typing, a skill that now seems to have been left behind in the last century, and that text input speeds, the standard of which was around 60 words a minute with expert typist reaching 100, is a lost art? In 2000, 44% of students took typing courses, a figure that has now fallen to 2.5%. Most students nowadays cannot type faster than 13 words per minute.
As young people grow into adults, tapping the predictive touchscreen of a smartphone is no longer enough, and a physical keyboard is the usual interface. If you have to be constantly looking at the keys, your output will fall to about thirteen words per minute, a serious disadvantage for many jobs.
Are we at a turning point, with traditional keyboards to be replaced by some other type of interface, probably based on generative AI, capable of taking dictation? Or are smartphone keyboards going to be the universal interface? The end of the keyboard, an archaic device that owes the arrangement of its keys to an attempt to prevent the hammers that carried the…
