Is Typing Going Extinct?

2AM thought that woke up me the other night…

The Last Generation That Types

I was in Walmart a few weeks ago, cutting through the electronics section, and there was a little girl standing in front of one of those Alexa Fire Tablets they have on display. She couldn’t have been older than five or six. Without any hesitation she just started talking to it. Asking it to play a song, asking it questions, having a whole little conversation with this thing like it was the most natural interaction in the world. Her mom was standing right there, not even phased by it. And it hit me that this kid’s first real relationship with technology is through her voice. Not a keyboard. Not even a touchscreen. Just talking.

That got me thinking about cursive… When I was growing up, cursive was a big deal. Teachers drilled it into us. You had to learn it, practice it, and eventually use it for everything. Fast forward to today and most kids can barely sign their own name. Cursive didn’t just fall out of fashion. It was actively removed. In 2010 the Common Core standards dropped cursive from the required curriculum and 46 states went along with it. Finland did the same thing in 2016. The reasoning was simple. Kids need to learn how to type, not how to loop their letters together. Classroom time is limited, and keyboards won.

And it worked. Typing replaced cursive. The National Literacy Trust ran a massive survey in 2024. They talked to over 76,000 kids in the UK and found that less than 29 percent of children between 8 and 18 enjoy writing in their free time. That number has been falling since 2010 and it dropped almost 6 points in just the last year alone. The number of kids who write something every day cut in half between 2023 and 2024. Over in the US, the EdWeek Research Center surveyed early educators in 2026 and found that 70 percent of them said their students’ fine motor skills had gotten worse in just the past two years. In the UK, 77 percent of primary teachers said their students have more trouble holding a pencil now than students did in 2000. Ok so think about that for a second. Kids are physically losing the ability to hold a pen properly. Not because something is wrong with them, but because they never needed to use one.

As i was looking some of this information, found some really interesting data from a brain science perspective. In 2024, researchers in Norway hooked up university students to EEG monitors and had them write things out by hand versus typing them. When the students wrote by hand, their brains lit up with connectivity patterns associated with memory and learning. When they typed, those same regions barely activated. The brain just wasn’t doing as much work. A few years before that, Mueller and Oppenheimer published a study in Psychological Science that showed students who took handwritten notes did significantly better on conceptual questions than students who typed their notes. The reason was that people who type tend to just transcribe what they hear word for word, but when you write by hand, you can’t keep up, so you’re forced to actually think about what matters and put it in your own words. That deeper processing is what makes the information stick. So when we swapped pens for keyboards, we didn’t just change the tool. We changed how the brain engages with information. And now I keep asking myself what happens as we swap keyboards for voice…

Because that’s clearly where things are headed…

Voice is Already Replacing Typing

The voice assistant market was worth about 9 billion dollars in 2025. By 2034 it’s projected to be worth 121 billion. That’s a very expensive bet on a future where people talk to their technology instead of typing at it. And honestly it makes sense. Think about how you already use AI. You can tell an AI to write an email and it writes the email. You can tell it to draft a report and it drafts the report. Software developers are using AI tools that write code for them while they just describe what they want. Typing is already becoming less about composing and more about creativity, reviewing, and approving.

Now think about the kids. Children born today are growing up in homes with Alexa and Siri and Google Home. They’re talking to these devices before they can read. By the time they get to school, talking to a computer is going to feel completely normal. Typing is going to feel slow and annoying. It’s going to feel the way handwriting feels to a teenager right now. Why would I bother with that when I can just say it?

This Has Happened Before

That’s exactly what happened with cursive. Smartphones didn’t just make handwriting less common. They made it feel pointless. If you can type a text in three seconds, why would you spend thirty seconds writing it out by hand? AI voice control is doing the same thing to typing right now. If you can say something and have polished text appear in front of you, why would you sit there and type it out letter by letter?

And when something feels pointless, people stop teaching it. When people stop teaching it, the next generation never learns it. And when a generation never learns something, the skill is gone. We watched it happen with cursive in real time.

This pattern actually has a name in academic circles. Researchers call it technological skill atrophy and it shows up everywhere. Back in 2011, Betsy Sparrow published a study in Science that people now call “the Google Effect.” She showed that when people know they can look something up online, they become less likely to actually remember it. We don’t memorize phone numbers anymore. Most people couldn’t give you directions to a place they’ve driven to a hundred times because they’ve always had GPS on. And speaking of GPS, research on London taxi drivers showed that years of navigating by memory actually changed the structure of their brains. Their hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in spatial memory, was measurably larger than average. GPS users don’t develop that. The tool that made navigation easier made the navigators themselves worse at navigating.

Calculators did this to mental math. The internet did this to our ability to focus for long periods of time. Nicholas Carr wrote a whole book about that in 2010 called The Shallows, making the case that the internet is literally rewiring our brains to favor shallow scanning over deep sustained thought.

Your phone isn’t just a device you carry. It’s functionally an extension of your memory and your ability to communicate. That sounds great until you realize the flip side. When the tool handles the cognitive work, the brain stops doing it. And brains that stop doing something eventually lose the ability to do it. Neuroplasticity goes both ways. You use it or you lose it.

Some might be inclined to push back and say that people have been predicting the death of various skills forever and it never actually happens. People said TV would kill books for instance. Fair enough. But cursive actually did die. The difference is whether the new technology actually replaces the functional need for the skill. TV didn’t replace the need to read. But keyboards genuinely replaced the need to write longhand. And AI is genuinely replacing the need to type.

And yeah, some people will always type. Just like some people still do calligraphy. That doesn’t mean it stays a mainstream skill. I’m not saying this happens tomorrow, but it’s probably a 10 to 30 year transition. But the direction is clear.

Food For Thought…

Here’s the thought that stopped me from falling back to sleep: We made the cursive decision blindly. We let it disappear from schools and then years later the neuroscience came in showing that handwriting does things for the developing brain that typing simply doesn’t do. Over 25 states are now rushing to bring cursive back into their curriculum, a full decade after they let it go. That’s a lot of kids who missed out on something important because nobody thought to study the consequences before pulling the plug. We have a chance to be smarter about this one. We could actually study what happens cognitively when people stop typing. We could think about what voice-only interaction does to developing minds before we find out the hard way.

Thought Eperiment: If keyboards killed cursive, and AI kills the keyboard, what happens to handwriting itself? Not text as a medium or style of writing. Not a tool for writing. The actual act of picking up something and making marks on a surface to represent words. When there’s no reason to type and no reason to write, how long before pen and paper become as rare as a quill and inkwell?

The generation that forgot cursive is already here. The generation that will forget how to type is being born right now.

How far behind is the generation that forgets how to “write” altogether?