Humans Typing Fast

This morning, I gave myself a classic typing test. There was a reason. I won’t claim it was a good one, but we’ll get to that. It concerned a job I learned about yesterday on LinkedIn, the first response to a profile change made recently: to “writer” and “translator” in the “open to work” area, I had added “transcription editor”.
Among the job requirements was a minimum typing speed of 50 wpm.
I think I type fast — not the fastest, but not bad. I just enjoy it. Maybe it’s a sense of speed, analogous to driving, or cycling. Maybe it’s a silly delusion. Anyway, a few years ago, for entirely different reasons, I began to do the “I remember” writing exercise fairly regularly: you set a timer for 15 minutes and write — anything that’s on your mind — without stopping. If you sense a pause coming, write “I remember” again and again, as fast as you can until you can pick up the thread again. The results vary, but it’s fun, and there’s almost always some surprise. Occasionally there’s a revelation (was that what I was thinking about?). The word count varies…usually around 600. I did the math. It works out to around 40 wpm. That’s not especially fast at all! It’s not even fast enough for this job (which, by this time, was rapidly losing whatever attraction it may have had initially)!
In due course, it dawned on me that I was calculating the time it had taken to write a text, when the standard test for typing speed measures the time it takes to copy an existing one (duh). So I found a congenial paragraph, set a stopwatch for one minute and clacked away. When the buzzer rang, and word count was 79, I had no memory, and no meaning from it. Apparently I can type almost twice as fast if I’m completely detached from the text.
Is there a moral to the story? Maybe a few. Perhaps fast typing is the sort of skill that humans best leave to machines. Perhaps we could just STOP competing with our own technologies. We could, for example, stop calling intensified, condensed language “artificial intelligence”, giving it far more credit than it has earned. It depends on one’s value system, of course. But say I detach myself from a text and aspire to type as fast as I can speak. Maybe, someday, I could grow up to be dictaphone. How wonderful?
And finally, I doubt I have any future as a transcription editor.