Keyboards and Autonomous Cars
Technology has evolved to the point where we put a man on the Moon, we have autonomous cars and AI capable of understanding human language and even producing what some agree to call “art”.
We carry computers in our pockets and wrists. Technology evolves quickly, and the power of AI seems to be constantly growing now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even suggested a Moore’s law for AI: Every 18 months the power of AI would duplicate.
Apparently, nothing can stop us Humans. Over the years we were able to re-invent ourselves at increasing speeds — especially over the past 200 years — at the rhythm of disappearing jobs, disappearing technologies, and so on.
But there are technologies that seem hard to die. There are even some that we think are dead but they are not. All these computers that are becoming lighter and smaller still work with something invented in the XIX century. The airplanes, starships, state of the art supercomputers are all connected to a kind of XIX-century artifact.
This artifact is the QWERTY keyboard. Christopher Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard in the 1870s. The main advantage of this new keyboard was the keys were reorganized to avoid the typewriter's mechanical arms clashing and jamming. This way, the operators could write faster because they wouldn’t need to wait for the arm to lower before hitting another key. Remington bought the design but this would reveal to be a flop during Sholes lifetime. He would die psychologically affected — some say — by the failure of his “superior design” for keyboards.
But somewhere at the beginning of the XX century, the QWERTY keyboard started to become popular and despite later different — and more efficient — formats being invented, none could beat the QWERTY popularity.
Today we know that this is not the most efficient configuration, it’s not even to most ergonomic. We also know that the only reason it was created is no longer valid: keyboards don’t have mechanical arms that jam, in fact, most of our devices don’t actually have a physical keyboard at all. But still, the keyboard we use in our smartphones is a QWERTY keyboard.
Apparently, the only reason why we keep using is because that’s the format people were trained to use and it’s very hard to simply change it. We can put it in other words: we use it because it had always been like that. So, apparently, after all the technological disruption of the last 100 years, nothing changed significantly in the way we interface with machines.
Around the same time, Alfred Vacheron participated in a Paris–Rouen race with the first car equipped with a steering wheel. After that, Panhard et Levassor started to equip all their cars with a steering wheel.
As happened with the keyboard, different steering wheels were invented later with no success. Nothing beat the popularity of the steering wheel as we know it.
In both cases, there aren’t any technical limitations that force us to use a wheel or a keyboard. Currently, we could just speak to computers and dictate what we want. We could also simply drive a car with a joystick. But, in some way, we prefer to use these interfaces to interact with different machines.
Rumors say that Jony Ive, the legendary designer, showed Tim Cook a prototype of the Apple car that didn’t have a steering wheel. Jony saw autonomous cars as an opportunity for people to hang out while the car drives them around and so the seats faced each other so people could just talk and interact during the trip. Tim wasn’t happy. He found the car too different from everything anyone would expect from a car. Critics would say that Tim is not a creative mind, but is he wrong?
Are we ready to dismiss the steering wheel because we have a level 5 autonomous vehicle? In other words, will a car without a steering wheel be a successful product?
Apparently, some designers and companies think so, ignoring history and how large systems are very hard to change. In fact, we could drive a car using a keyboard today, or a joystick today. But we don’t want to.
We, humans, are analogic. All the Universe is. Driving gives us an analogic connection: we say we “feel the car”, we feel the acceleration and the force on the steering wheel and we like it. It gives us the sense of being in control. Are we going to throw this way just because technology allows us to? Technology has to be a means and not an end, so why would we want an autonomous car that doesn't allows us to drive it if we want to?
Are we dwelling in the past or, in the end, will we be just humans?
