Eventually, the intellectual and technological elite, which includes me, and you also, is going to have the same arguments about writing as we are now having about reading.

People will shift away from keyboards to produce written words. We’ll speak into microphones, at first clumsily and eventually efficiently with our own individual shorthands. Words commonly mistransformed by software will enter formal and spoken language. Academic papers will be written about it, this time not without irony.

There will be backlash. Writing is a lost art, we will say. Anyone can put text on a screen, but real writing is done with fingers pressing on keys, with keys pressing back on fingers in kind but ultimately yielding. Our new writing, in contrast, yields to the computers representing it.

Then we will stop writing altogether.