The Noise Problem Nobody Talks About
The Noise Problem Nobody Talks About
Today I read an article published by Fortune in which Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, argues that within three years keyboards will become obsolete, replaced by chatbots and fully voice-activated computing.
It is a clean, optimistic thesis. And like many clean theses, it breaks as soon as it touches reality.
The Living Room Test
At home, we already live inside a highly digital environment. Everyone sits on the sofa with a device in hand, typing, chatting, prompting AI, jumping between conversations and tools. Even there, silence is not accidental. It is what makes parallel interaction possible. I cannot imagine a living room where everyone speaks to their phone at the same time. Not because the technology is missing, but because the social friction would be immediate and exhausting.
The Office Amplifies This
In software development, silence is not a side effect, it is a prerequisite. Teams do not spend the day speaking out loud. Calls are pushed into phone booths. Discussions are moved into meeting rooms. The default working mode is quiet, focused, and massively parallel. Replacing keyboards with voice would turn this equilibrium into constant noise. A room full of developers talking to AI agents is not futuristic. It is dysfunctional.
Voice interaction has a role. It works in isolated contexts, for accessibility, for short commands, for hands-busy situations. But as a primary interface for knowledge work, it does not scale socially. The limitation is not recognition accuracy or latency. It is coexistence.
The Real Constraint
Keyboards survive because they are socially compatible. They allow precision without noise, concurrency without interference, long reasoning without performance. They fit shared spaces, both domestic and professional, in a way voice simply does not.
For this reason, I do not believe keyboards are about to disappear. Not in three years, and not as a consequence of AI progress. The constraint here is human, not technical.
For Future Reference
I am writing this post to mark the prediction, so we can come back to it in a few years and see who was right.
The original article: SAP boss Christian Klein has seen the AI future