Training for My Illiteracy
- Rich Washburn
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
I was talking to a buddy yesterday, explaining how I work with my AI agent. How often I just talk to it. How I don't even type most of the time.
"I don't really have a keyboard on my desk," I said. "I have one next to my desk. I don't use it that much." I either have the agent read things back to me, or I convert the output to audio and listen while I'm driving. He looked at me for a second and said, "So you're illiterate." I laughed. "I mean, I can read. I read all the time. I just don't." Then I thought about it. "Actually, maybe I am illiterate. I wouldn't even know." And he said, "You're training for your illiteracy."
That's the one that stuck. Training for my illiteracy. Because that's exactly what it feels like. Not the losing-the-ability part. The choosing-not-to part. The part where the gap between what I can do with my hands and what I can do with my voice has gotten so wide that typing feels like writing a letter by hand — technically possible, increasingly absurd.
Here's the thing that's weird about it. I'm not regressing. I'm not losing anything. If anything, I'm processing more information, faster, than I ever have. I'm writing more. I'm publishing more. I'm building more. The output hasn't decreased. The input method changed. But the instinct to reach for a keyboard is going away. And I notice it most when I sit down at someone else's desk. There's a keyboard. A mouse. A screen. And I instinctively look for the thing I can talk to. The thing that listens. And it's not there. And I think, "How do you people still work like this?" That thought should embarrass me. It doesn't. And that might be the most interesting part.
My buddy's joke was funny because it's true in a way that makes people uncomfortable. We have a cultural assumption that reading and writing — the physical acts of decoding text and producing text with your hands — are the fundamental interface for intelligence. The baseline. The thing you lose at your peril. But what if they're not the fundamental interface? What if they're just the interface we had? The one we built everything around because there wasn't an alternative. And what if the alternative is better — not because it's faster, but because it matches how humans actually think?
We think in language. We speak before we write. Children talk years before they type. The voice is the original interface. Text is the translation layer we built because, for five thousand years, we didn't have machines that could listen. Now we do.
I'm not saying reading is going away. That would be a stupid thing to say and also obviously wrong. I'm saying the keyboard is going away. For me, it already has. Not because I can't use it. Because I don't need to. The friction between my thought and the execution of my thought has collapsed to the point where the keyboard is a speed bump.
And here's where the "illiteracy" framing gets interesting. My buddy was joking, but he was also naming something real. I am outsourcing a physical skill. The question is whether that skill matters anymore. This is the same question we've asked about every interface shift. Did losing the ability to navigate by stars make us worse at navigation? Did losing the ability to do long division in our heads make us worse at math? Did losing the ability to write letters by hand make us worse at communication?
The answer is always: no, but it made us different. The old skill encoded a constraint, and the constraint disappeared, and what we did with the freed-up capacity was the interesting part.
I'll tell you what I did with it. I started talking instead of typing. And talking is closer to how I actually think. When I type, I edit as I go. I backspace. I restructure. I lose the thread because I'm managing the interface instead of managing the idea. When I talk, the ideas come out in the order they occur to me, and the agent catches them, organizes them, and hands them back in a shape I can work with. The result is that I think better out loud than I ever did on paper. Not because I'm smarter. Because the interface stopped fighting me.
That's the part my buddy didn't get. He thinks I'm losing literacy. What I'm losing is the keyboard. And the keyboard was never the point. The point was always the thinking.
Here's where I'd normally say something like "maybe this is a phase" or "maybe I'll come back to typing." I'm not going to say that. I don't think I'm coming back. Every week, I type less and talk more. Every week, the agent gets better at understanding what I mean, not just what I say. Every week, the gap between my thought and the execution of my thought gets smaller.
My buddy said I'm training for my illiteracy. He's right, but not in the way he meant. I'm training for a world where the interface between human intention and machine execution is voice. Where the keyboard is a museum piece. Where "illiteracy" doesn't mean you can't read — it means you stopped needing to type. And if that's illiteracy, I'm all in. Because the stuff I'm producing now — the articles, the analyses, the systems, the work — is better than anything I produced with a keyboard under my hands. Not because I'm working harder. Because I'm working the way I think. The keyboard was always a translation layer. I just stopped translating.
Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.
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