In case you haven’t noticed, now is a rather excellent time to be alive.

For those who love the written word, these are off-the-charts good times. Whatever we want to read — all of it, available, instantly. Need a larger font edition whipped up for you? Done. Illuminate the page just so, for a cozy ambience? Very good sir.

And if you write — Lordy! It appears the law of gravity has just been repealed. The cost of a truly wonderful writing machine has been lightened to latte budget levels. And you can carry one of these magical pads anywhere, more easily than paper. Salad days, these are.

For writers, what’s not to like? Research anything, anytime, from practically anywhere on the planet. Phalanxes of pro bono robots, at the ready to find stuff for you. Unlimited editing power at your fingertips to develop your idea, and near zero inertia for each new draft. Then, just seconds after polishing your opus, publish it right from your cafe table to an audience of millions, effectively for free.

Wha — huh — who? How did all this happen? This is the overnight revolution … that was decades in the making. A lot of heavy lifting was done, and now it’s real. This gleaming new future has very much arrived, and there is bounty such as we have never known before.

Splendid! What About that Keyboard?

Now here we are, with all of this going so very swimmingly, and we come upon that one, troublesome, niggling little detail: That damn keyboard.

If you touch type, to put it bluntly, no tablet keyboard is as good as those on bigger machines. Not one. This is not cool at all. But it’s true. That sloppy tablet keyboard gums up the greatness. It is the rogue in our dream — that nemesis that interrupts the weightless, soaring high of free flight, and turns gravity back on with a vengeance. And here gravity returns Hydra-esque, so now it opposes you in every direction. A keyboard that fights your every flow of thought? Major buzz-kill.

Where did we go wrong? How could this shimmering new future be in some way less potent than the past? The technology of Tablets — these wafer-thin supercomputers with gorgeous screens you command at your fingertips — this is all so amazingly good, how could we possibly bollix the basics? Did our best and brightest take stupid pills when it came to keyboards? Hardly.

Why This Is So Hard to Do Right

Unexpectedly, it turns out that it’s daunting to bring industrial strength touch typing to tablets. The bar is set quite high by the best laptops and desktops — typing on them can be delightful. But the extreme constraints of the tablet’s physical form and scale make it extraordinarily difficult to match this typing experience.

What is so vexing is that the very qualities that make a tablet so wonderfully intimate, are the same ones that frustrate touch typing. It’s reciprocal and intrinsic. So much so that the Eminence Grise of designers at Apple recognized these conflicts, and wisely regard tablets as a distinctly different species from laptops. The competition, meanwhile, remains confused and keeps concocting combos that are good at neither. Yet notwithstanding all the real and inherent conflicts, great touch typing on your stunning new iPad Air is exactly what people in fact want. Impossible or not.

Solutions … that Aren’t

Enter the gadget makers of today — a school of remoras feeding at the belly of the whale, the Apple leviathan. Their solution is to so saddle your svelte tablet that it loses its fundamental identity, and with it, its principal magic. “If you act right now, we’ll double the girth of your iPad for you, throw in wimpy keys that are too close together, and bundle it all in a heavy package you’ve got to unpack just to see your screen! Yeah!”

Hmmm. “Suboptimal” would be a dignified word. No tablet keyboard is as good, and no tablet itself remains as good, post-graft. We seem to be in an unhappy stasis here. Well … deal with it. Just use a laptop when you write. Why should this matter? Why would something so pedestrian as a decent tablet keyboard be of any real consequence anyway?

Because… we are at a rare crossroads. It is a choice that may well shape what we become.

Whatever Languishes, Is Lost

Tablets, and their smartphone brethren, are so bloody good, their dominance is inexorable. Even the avid writers among us, while cursing and spitting about the typing, cannot resist the lure of the marvelous new machines’ myriad advantages. They are good. One by one, we adopt them. And as we type on glass, we begin to change. We look for shortcuts to forestall frustration. It all used to be so fluid, so easy — like breathing while you think. But now we hem and haw about whether some nascent idea is really worth typing to harvest. The shiny new saber, in one very glaring way, is not as sharp as the last one. Clearly this was not the intent, but consequences know not of their provenance. They simply exist.

For more and more people, their writing machine is their smartphone, or another tablet. What Everyman does when it comes to writing, is defining. If we get this wrong, writing goes the way of cooking. The competency gulf will grow, and it will polarize us to even further extremes. Not to worry, you might say — let the specialists handle the writing. After all, the gradual winnowing of cooking skill didn’t work out so bad, right? We are better at it, though in narrower ranks. There’s all those awesome restaurants — just Yelp them if you’re hungry. Software will even suggest one — for you. You know, multiple-choice-style.

Maybe you’re not a foodie, and perhaps you don’t really mind algorithmic prompting. But thinking — independent synthesis of original thought — this is not of the same stratum as cooking. Thinking defines us. And the act of writing is instrumental to the precision of thought itself. We may wish to reconsider whether we’re so willing to outsource much of this ability too.

The Power, the Peril, and the Promise

The tablet is taking over, and it is indeed better at nearly everything — with the ironic exception of writing. The diminished ease with which we can type is not a hopeful development. It makes writing less pleasurable, and therefore less likely. Our mastery of video consumption may soon reach sublime levels. Meanwhile, we may find ourselves unable to write our way out of a paper bag. This is not anyone’s plan, but it could be the unwitting progeny of this new paradigm.

Good and bad comes with every technological revolution. Mostly good. But products don’t invent themselves, people do, in pursuit of what motivates them. If we can recognize the undesirable side-effects of this amazing new platform, we most certainly can fix them.

Today for example, you can buy an electric car that’s faster than a Porsche, more spacious than a Mercedes, yet more efficient than a Prius. All in a single car. It’s real, and it’s restoring hope to what seemed a hopeless industry. Better technology did that. And why not? We need it.

Why shouldn’t we be able to write anytime, anywhere, with something that feels better than even the biggest, beefiest keyboards on our desks? We want all this without compromising any of the essence that makes the Tablet so transformative. And why not? We need this too.

Just because it’s impossible, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. There are those among us who believe we can do materially better here, and it is a job worth doing. At this moment in our social evolution, it may even be defining.

Better typing technology, intelligently alloyed with the power of tablets, can make the experience of writing better than it has ever been. Not almost as good. Better. It could usher in a Springtime for Thought like we have never seen.

Wouldn’t that be cool?