On the way to the doctor's office today I was reading a Scientific American I had in my bag from my last trip to Boston. For some reason traveling means I can spend as much money as I want, including on newsstand price magazines.
Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?
The article is a survey of all of the amazing things done interfacing computers and the brain. The chimp brain controlling the robotic arm to get a banana...the best of cochlear implants turning sounds into impulses that create a sensation of sound in the brains of deaf people, etc...
AND TO THE RANDOM OTHER MUSING ABOUT PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY
So my doctor uses a tablet PC and her palm pilot for everything. Instead of charts, she has a file on her tablet pc and she types things up after. The topic of doctor handwriting or just handwriting in general came up and I mentioned a high school classmate of mine whose handwriting was so bad due to a lack of spatial reasoning that he had to take notes on a palm pilot with a keyboard attachment, and his in class essay exams were printed out. Special APs, everything.
And she said how one of her sons has good handwriting but the other's is terrible. And that she "doesn't know why printing is so important anyway. They make such a big deal when there's not really a time he can't get around it."
And then I almost said something to the effect of "but we must stay HUMAN!" But really, it does feel weird. What if someone couldn't write? I mean, yes, right now there are still uses of handwriting a note, but I can definitely forsee a time, in a classroom rich enough to have keyboards...where everyone has a Blackberry...when the art of writing in the calligraphy sense is completely gone. Not lost, but simply very easily gotten around. I mean, my classmate did everything on his palm pilot and that seemed weird...it wouldn't take much for it not to seem weird.
Man and Machine. Destined to be married.
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