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I never learned to type. My typing skills can’t become obsolete.
Even shitting is becoming obsolete. Total parenteral nutrition can dump the nutrients right into your venous system, skipping the whole trip thru the GI tract.
The biggest problem with autocomplete, I find, is that it doesn’t work at all with userids and passwords. Those have no patterns, obviously, and they have to be entered exactly correctly, character by character. I see no way to get around entering them except by typing them in.
Allright we have two who can actually use morse code and at least one who can read a map
I do believe typing will largely go away
It works with a *learning *autocomplete program, like SwiftKey X. You can have it scour your emails and see what words you use a lot, like your usernames and those of your friends.
Well, to be specific it doesn’t work with whatever the iPhone uses. I still have a lot of trouble entering my iTunes account password. I’m constantly touching the wrong letter and having to go back.
Well you really can’t judge the power of a technology by closed-source examples of it.
I think a lot of people here are just dismissing the notion out of hand without looking forward at all. Sure, some people can type as fast as they talk, but that’s a result of conditioning. You’ve become typists.
I’m not saying that there will never be a need for keyed input of any kind, but that manually keying every single letter for every type of correspondence will soon be a relic.
As I said “The phrase “Hey Man, what are you doing?” has many characters, and requires some punctuation input when typed. If I wanted to text that to someone, I would open up the text interface, press the letter H, and could complete my message using only suggested words. Seven keystrokes, all of them being the enter button.”
True, this will not always apply in every situation, but to say that keyboard entry will always be the way we communicate seems short-sighted to me.
Things like T9 were invented to save time, and auto complete is becoming more popular, as is predictive text via SwiftkeyX and Google auto complete. I’m not saying that these, or even speech-to-text are the future, but I’d bet that future communication will ditch the notion of having to type every single letter of every word all the time. This doesn’t make a keyboard obsolete, but it makes faster and more intuitive communication a feasible substitute for old-fashioned typing.
From 2002 to current, I make captions, subtitles and scripts for many clients you’ve heard of, like CBS, NBC, AMC, even Girls Gone Wild.
Although voice recognition software might help, wait at least 20 years. The reason you have captions, subtitles, scripts (and all the fucking changes that have to be noted at or after filming), is I type them, along with thousands (literally) of caption editors. Typing loss won’t be in our lifetime.
When people ask me about it they usually say something like, “Doesn’t a machine do that?” The answer is yes, me at a computer with something voice recognition doesn’t have… fingers. 
One recog program a studio I worked with tried to get recognition from the teaser of a Law & Order episode. Car horns were thought to be human speakers, and this was just last year.
How about a translation for the teeming millions who don’t know Morse?
In addition, speaking uses a different part of the brain from typing. My cite: a guy I worked with who always took minutes at our meetings. He had the ability to write perfect minutes reflecting what everyone said while engaging in the discussion. He had a path from his ears to his fingers which did not seem to intersect with the part of his brain involved either in thinking what to say or saying it.
As for me, I think through my fingers in a different from the way I think through my mouth.
Plus, you can backspace and erase faster typing than by combining speaking and typing. Not for typos - for rewriting a section of a sentence you got wrong.
There was a Dilbert cartoon where Wally had a voice recognition system he was showing off to Dilbert. Dilbert said loudly and clearly “Delete all files.”
The auto complete on my Kindle pissed me off yesterday. I was emailing a friend (who is currently jobless) about a dba position, and it would not let me put dba in. It kept switching it to dna. I finally had to put in d b a.
My wife is a professional translator. She worked for a few years for a translation firm and was required to dictate her translations, which went to a typist, who typed them (with errors of course) and then printed hard copy that she had to read and mark corrections that went back to the typist who then corrected the errors (most of the time) and then printed it again and gave it to her to begin another iteration. When she complained that she would be must faster if she typed it herself, the owner told her, “I pay translators to translate and typists to type. I will not pay translators wages for typing.” She could not get through to him the idea that she could type as fast as she could translate. And she begged to at least allow her to fix the errors. No dice. Eventually, she went free-lance and did speed up substantially.
For me, it is inconceivable that I could ever dictate mathematics. I type relatively slowly, but still faster than I think. The best thing I ever did was learn touch typing more than 30 years ago. From a book my wife had called something like “Teach Yourself Typing” from the 40s that included exercises on how to hit the carriage return and how to set the margins. I was going to type my own papers (because preparing a very careful hand-written draft and the iterations of corrections were so time consuming), but within about two years, I had my first computer and was using my new typing skills on it (using the line edit program that came with PCs, at least at first).
I like the post that pointed out that if your prose was so predictable that a computer could anticipate it, it couldn’t be very original and maybe didn’t need saying in the first place.
I think I’ve found a new sig line. 
Or maybe the computer can just replace you. 
I work as a typist for a living, too (office administrator), and I don’t see typing going away any time soon, either. There’s a number of factors at play - companies are conservative and don’t make changes quickly, people working at companies don’t embrace new technology quickly or willingly, and the technology to completely replace all the typing that goes on in a typical office seems to be quite a long way out, in my opinion.
An analogous situation might be the adoption of a paperless office - we can do it at this point, but no offices do. We’ve just added electronic stuff to the paper-filled world, not replaced it.
Predicting text, and prompting probable words does not preclude originality, or profundity.
I’m talking about efficiency of text entry. Keyed entry is good enough for many people, but suggestions can only make it faster. The suggestions do not supplant the text, they merely give you a shortcut to enter the desired word. This is a faster, more intuitive method of conveying text.
Keyboards (in some form) will always be needed for another for a very long time.
Typing however, will always be one keystroke per letter, or something more efficient, and I’m betting on the latter. I’m confident now, that people who do not use an app like SwiftkeyX (I’m not a shill for them) will not see the value in what I’m talking about.
Typing classes were yesterday. The fastest, most readable method of communication is going to be the new norm. Text prediction is a huge part of that.
The technology will have to become far, far more sophisticated before it’s even close to a reasonable possibility. I’ve yet to find a predictive text program that will get more than one word in three correct within a simple text message, possibly because of my naturally idiosyncratic sentence structure.
Far more likely, I think, would be a widespread improvement in text recognition, and everyone writing longhand on a touchscreen. My handwriting is atrocious these days, but that’s mostly a function of how rarely I need to use it.