All thumbs...good and bad

Facebook's icon for 'like' is an icon of a 'thumbs up,' a universal 'OK' or 'I agree' gesture.  The prehensile thumb evolved somewhere between 2.3 and 2.6 million years ago long before Homo Erectus 200,000 years in the past.  Certainly it allows the unique grips that distinguishes us from other mammals and allows us to create and use tools.

It's the combination of the thumb and the fingers that allow the male hand to form into a fist when needed and the female hand to remain slightly different but more dexterous.  Of course the more awkward among us can be labelled "all thumbs."  Mechanical tasks, fine motor skills and certain tactile accomplishments remain outside their reach grasp.

Texting on our legacy flip phones and now all applications on our smart phones have made us all "all thumbs."  The QWERTY keyboard, used correctly or even with a caffeine motivated hunt and peck user offers advantages, the most obvious that you don't have to look at your hands thumbs.  Driving and using your phone is dangerous.  With a separate set of hands you could probably use a QWERTY keyboard and drive without unanticipated contact.

It would be nice if we all focused on using all our digits, write long sentences, perhaps paragraphs, short stories, biographies, complex thoughts, plans and solutions, emotional expressions, poetry and novels much less look at people and where we are going other than that hunk of silicon and glass and software and monthly service fees.  Thumb typing seems to be moving backwards in this evolutionary journey.  What happens 2.3 to 2.6 million years in the future when our fingers are purposeless (from a typing perspective) and we have just a thumb and some sort of fleshy pad for holding our smartphone?