I have a book on Pittman Shorthand. It seems like a very nice script; in fact, I have often thought of how I would reform English spelling, and Pittman shorthand comes damn close to what I would come up with anyway...there's no way I could learn it, though, without heavy-duty drilling. It's basically like learning to write all over again; there is no relation to normal English spelling.
I don't mind so much that computers are taking over, but I do wish standards of layout and typography were so much higher. The lowest-common-denominator that I fear isn't computers themselves, but the lack of standards WITHIN computer-generated correspondence--give a man a word processer, and now he thinks he's a typesetter. Or rather, he doesn't know what a typesetter is, because graphics arts have been obsolete for 20 years now. It's saddening, but typical, that publications have worse typography and layout now than they did 50 years ago, despite all this technology. The content generation chain has been dehumanized by desktop publishing--it's like it would be if radio hosts were entirely replaced by computer voices, or something. The typesetter has been replaced by a computer. The content generators are happy to not think about typesetting, which was fine when there were humans setting the type, but now it's a computer, and so the entire world gets whatever typesetting Word or desktop publishing software has programmed in. Nobody uses hair spaces around em dashes, nothing is kerned properly, and justification looks like crap. Also, nobody uses diereses anymore.