Unless in very niche case, I feel the age of (mechanical) keyboard in computing will end. We have already seen many computers (that includes mobiles and tablets) shipped without a physical keyboard, they do have a virtual keyboard in them, but as natural interfaces increases like sound, gesture recognition, I feel the use of keyboard will be marginalized and perhaps will end.

I wonder how this will affect programing world. We programmers love keyboards. We use editors that have great keyboard integration, we love editors like Vim and Emacs which greatly enhance the power of keyboard over mouse. For people like us, coders, some writers and others, typing would be far faster than say speaking. for others, huge majority of the world would like to speak to computers, show gestures to them rather than to type commands into it.

Things like twitter and Facebook will become obsolete in near future if they don’t innovate. Sharing life wont be typing something into text box and waiting for pictures and videos to be uploaded, people will be having stuff like Google glasses that will help in real time sharing of life and commenting by videos and voice.

The age of future social life and computing will be exciting. And the role of keyboard will be greatly reduced or perhaps it may vanish.