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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2. Once the AI knows your usual supermarket then that's where it will bring you. A complete shorthand for interpersonal communication will spring up, obviating the need to express the kind of nuance that we use presently solely to delude ourselves that we have something to say that can't be statistically derived from the total sum of former human communication.

Meanwhile I'll be in my sweet, sweet grave.

Edit: looks like HN can't show the shopping trolley

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In the 80s a pundit predicted that in the future the interface to spreadsheets would be a games controller, because that's what the kids were growing up with and would want to use when they grew up. Then 10 years ago it was txt shrt abrvs wr t ftr. Except actually they were just the product of now ridiculously dated numeric keypad input the kids of today know nothing about.

The latest kids craze is always the wave of the future, except actually it's usually just a craze and will end up looking just as dated as the Rubik's Cube.

It's a thought worth considering though. Basically you have your fingers at the "home row" at all times, so no delay or errors from travel. Also you have analog input instead of digital!

I'd say that the market have optimized creativly the gamepads to near 1:1 through put w/o having to think about backwards compatility.

What holds us back is the vast majority of minimum effort pencil pushers who want to spend 8 hours at work and don't care if things get done. They would never see the idea of making their job go faster say by a better keyboard and or by writing a nifty script to automate some dull toil. As long as they have a legally protected job they'll just go there 8 hours a day and don't care if they are doing something that could be automated in an hour!

I can say "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode. For that matter, I can type "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode.

But Neo, what good are your typing skills... if you don't have a physical keyboard?

But what good is your comment... since I do have a keyboard?

And in situations where I don't have a keyboard, these days, I do have speech recognition.

Those comments are me responding, having had to guess what your point is. If I've missed, could you perhaps clarify your point?

Presumably, emoji commands will become a thing in an era when soft keyboards are the norm for personal computing devices and emoji input will therefore be easy.

More likely, such commands will take the form of a changing panel of custom ideographs. Think fast-food POS terminals.

Well... if I can input any emoji (or worse, any Unicode), then I still can almost certainly type "home" faster than the emoji. If I have something POS style, where there are only a few icons available, and the icon I actually need is part of the set, and I'm familiar with the layout so I don't have to hunt for it, then I can probably touch the home icon faster than I can type "home" - but still probably not faster than I can say it.

But you can touch it faster than the sum of the time it takes you to say it and the time it takes the machine to recognize what you said. And the touch will be more accurate.

Eventually, people will get tired of drawing pictures of houses and shopping trolleys, the glyphs will become increasingly simplified and abstract, and we'll finally have Yingzi. https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Wasn't one of the characters in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" struggling with reading iconographics, a disability similar to dyslexia - but for glyphs?

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