Working on your typing skills or even learning Dvorak or Colemak (admittedly, I have) to make you a more efficient worker? That may be all for nothing as Intel believes that we'll be able to control our computers with our brains by 2020.
Intel and its research partners are studying how brain acts when it thinks. For example, scientists have found that people's brains react in a similar manner when asked to think of a bear.
Through sensors that can detect this sort of brain activity, Intel think that it will be able to read and translate this into an input system thanks to a brain implantable chip.
"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau told Computerworld. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."
Even if thinking about a bear isn't enough to detect that you want to copy and paste something, Intel still thinks that there's a future in using your brain instead of the keyboard.
"If we can get to the point where we can accurately detect specific words, you could mentally type," he added. "You could compose characters or words by thinking about letters flashing on the screen or typing whole words rather than their individual characters."
While this may all sound far-fetched, or perhaps even inconvenient for present time, Intel thinks that it's possible and something we'll all want.
"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."
Make good use of your fancy mouse and keyboard set up before they're obsolete, folks.
