There seems to be a growing view that the computer keyboard is on the way out. Demoted, at least, as the primary method of input at work. Kate Clark, writing in the Wall Street Journal, looked at the trend of tech start-up employees using AI dictation software to turn “rambling” streams of conscious into “coherent, useable text in seconds”.

“Across Silicon Valley, work is being remade as once mellow spaces become dens of din,” Clark wrote. The headline reads: “Typing Is Being Replaced by Whispering — and It’s Way More Annoying.”

Thank God, I thought, that I don’t work at a Silicon Valley start-up.

I do, however, work at Bloomberg — so imagine my distress when I read the following words from Kevin Sheekey, our head of communications, in his newsletter on Wednesday morning: “The quiet office may soon become a historical artefact. The office of the future could sound less like a library and more like a sales floor. I can’t wait :)”

I can wait. Preferably for ever, or at least until I retire in (knock on wood) 20-odd years, at which point I’ll walk out the door safe in the knowledge that, in my day, we achieved our work with a keyboard. My streams of consciousness, my distractions, my tangents — they stayed internal, as is proper in a civilised society.

This might be a losing battle. Wispr, a developer of one of the most popular apps for this purpose, is closing in on funding that would value it at $2 billion. (I tried using its app to work on this column, as a test, but quickly succumbed to embarrassment and shame.)

Just last week I had a someone reply to a request for an interview using what he referred to as “AI-assisted articulation”. Harshith Vaddiparthy, a tech executive, read my e-mail asking for his view on the reliability of Anthropic’s coding tool. Then he spoke into his computer using OpenClaw, a speech-to-text tool, “to create a full doc with my thoughts.” He reviewed it before sending it to me.

“The key nuance I would emphasise is that OpenClaw is not independently inventing answers on my behalf,” Vaddiparthy told me after I quizzed him about it. “The point of view is mine.”

Is it, though? I get what he’s saying: they are his thoughts, structured into text, then approved. But I think he’s kidding himself, as is anyone else delegating to these tools. An unstructured, unarticulated thought spoken aloud is merely a half-thought; a raw egg cracked into a cold pan.

“Writing is thinking,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough said in 2002. “To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

Maybe you don’t care about writing well. That’s another argument I hear in favour of AI-assisted articulation: “I’m typing up meeting notes, not writing the next great American novel.”

Sure, there are many (most) jobs where writing is not part of the end product, nor an important component of it. In fact, many of us these days attribute the need to write as the most soul-crushing part of our day. “Let’s stop pretending there are different jobs,” comedy producer Kate Helen Downey wrote in 2021. “There’s only one job and it’s e-mails.”

But using AI to outsource this drudgery, appealing as it sounds, is to put your brain on the bench. When AI structures “your” thoughts and does “your” writing, it will do it according to the broadest possible denominator, your output homogenised for the masses like an Ikea bookshelf.

Companies will be faced with an even bigger swamp of internal communications as employees have their bots carry out things they ordinarily would not be bothered to do.

The false productivity gain risks a compounding effect where nobody quite knows who decided what and why. Workplaces will become cacophonous as employees bark instructions at their chatbots.

“Visiting AI start-ups today is like showing up at a high-end call centre,” the Journal reported from the front lines of a new kind of office hell.

If those AI capabilities were to ever go away — as well they might, given the perilous economics of the AI industry — you’ll be left wondering how you ever got things done, just as you already (I’ll bet) struggle to get to even familiar places without GPS.

The skill decay won’t happen all at once. “AI reliably improves immediate task performance while degrading the underlying human capabilities that produce that performance,” Tom Slater, a partner at investment management firm Baillie Gifford, wrote in his insightful essay on cognitive outsourcing. “You get better results today but become less capable tomorrow.”

Such dependency is the business model. “We’re turning intelligence into a global utility,” read a recent press release from OpenAI.

Unlike the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on OpenAI’s servers, the mysterious, miraculous data centre contained in your skull is free to use and powered to its fullest when articulating your thoughts — thoughts that will surprise you.

The writer Charles Bukowski once remarked the “typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on”. These are the breakthroughs that matter, the work that will mean you can be a true contributor, the work that won’t be replaced.

Consider all this when wondering if you should stop or reduce writing in aid of chatting away to an AI. “A world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds,” wrote Paul Graham, one of the rapidly-diminishing number of tech venture capitalists who can still apparently think straight. “It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.”

Even the most mundane writing keeps you thinking. Your keyboard is a shield against a world where your purpose is diminished. I’ll be clinging to mine tightly.

• Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News