The Keyboard Is a Weight Around Your Neck

For nearly two million years, our ancestors conducted by voice. Homo erectus planned a hunt on the African savanna the same way — a leader directing the group, vision flowing straight to voice to action, with nothing in between. Our brains evolved around it. Only in the last blink did we start ramrodding our vision through keyboards and spreadsheets. QWERTY is a 150-year-old speck at the very tail of a two-million-year story, and it was designed to do one thing: stop typewriter arms from jamming.

What typing actually costs you

Typing was never one thing. It's a four-or-five-step relay across some seven parts of your brain: find the word, find the keys, move the fingers, glance from keyboard to screen and back, fix the typo. By the time you add it all up, you're creating with an estimated 30 to 40 percent less of your mind available, because so much of it is busy just running your hands. You've been painting your vision with a weight cinched around your neck your whole life — and never knew it was there.

Cut it loose

Cut it loose and, at first, you sputter. It's like an old diesel engine that sat under a tarp in a shed for years: it coughs, it smokes, it's forgotten how to run. But clear it out, let it warm up, and nothing can stop it — it pulls harder and puts out more than anything else on the lot. That's your mind on voice, once you get used to it.

There's a quiet majesty to it that still hasn't gotten old for me after millions of spoken words: you close your eyes, articulate the thing in your mind, and watch it appear — exactly where you wanted it — on the screen.

One day we'll have neural links and won't even need our voices. But that day isn't here yet, and this upgrade is. The QWERTY keyboard is the last flint blade humanity is still using to conduct intelligence. Throw it away.

— Grant Whitmer