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A comment on Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years?. Parent comment

Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by snippyhollow on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:30PM (#2077284)
Having a direct brain interface working implies both understanding of the speech-related part of the brain as well as a big advance in artificial intelligence to deal with the noisy signal. (Perfectly dealing with the brain signals is at least as hard as perfect NLP / prefect machine translation.)
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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by showerst on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:47PM (#2077379)
I'll (attempt to) draw a counter to that: A machine need not understand out brains 'native' language processing, just a trained 'output' version.

There is already a crude toy out there that will 'read your mind' and raise or lower a ball based on a signal you send it, you just train it to a binary state. I've heard it described as mellowing out vs concentrating hard.

There's no reason in principle that a reader with fine enough discrimination couldn't be trained to recognize a few hundred states, and you couldn't be trained to 'think' a few hundred things, where the reader would recognize and translate the pattern into a number, letter, or symbol. I'm no neurologist so I have no idea how these things actually work, but it seems easier in theory than understanding the whole of brain and language.

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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by ori_b on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:37PM (#2077324)
Agreed. I don't think it's going to be happening in the next 20 years, at least not well enough to replace the keyboard. However, it's the only alternative I can imagine that would be a real improvement over keyboard input.

Edit: Note, I can imagine the need for direct text input being reduced over the next 20 years thanks to UI changes ("Select your house on this map" replacing "Type your address in this box", for example), but I don't think that the keyboard will go away as the main tool for doing it when it is needed.

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