The Tools We Built Now Shape Us: OpenAI's President Calls Typing a Passing 'Phase'

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said humans "contort" ourselves around computers, describing clicking and typing as a "phase" that will eventually pass. A growing number of companies and voice-first advocates are betting that voice interaction with computers represents the future — where tools adapt to human speech rather than requiring humans to learn their interfaces.

Brockman's word — contort — names something hiding in plain sight. We built computers to serve us, and somewhere along the way, we became the ones who adapted: learning their keyboards, memorizing their menus, holding their postures for hours. The contortion became so familiar it felt like normal life. It took a tech executive naming it for the strangeness to resurface.

The contrast is between what feels essential and what actually serves us. Typing and clicking are so embedded in daily work that questioning them sounds almost absurd. Yet Brockman is pointing to a reversal we rarely notice: the tools we created for our benefit have quietly trained us to fit their logic. A growing number of companies are betting that voice-first interaction can flip that relationship — but that bet doesn't automatically restore anything. A new interface could simply become a contortion we haven't learned to see yet.

That deeper question reaches beyond Brockman's prediction about voice replacing typing. The phone we reach for without thinking, the app whose rhythm sets our own, the platform whose design quietly decides what we notice — each began as a tool we chose. Each can become something we serve. Wisdom has always required this kind of honest seeing: the willingness to step back from what feels ordinary and ask whether it is moving us toward flourishing or merely moving us.

Brockman's observation doesn't prove that voice is better, healthier, or more human than typing, and newer tools don't automatically restore dignity. But his word leaves us with a question worth carrying: what have we stopped noticing — what contortion has become so familiar we call it normal — and is it still serving us, or have we quietly begun serving it?