[larsiusprime]

If native speakers are starting to have character amnesia too, does that suggest in the long run you would expect the writing systems to simplify towards the phonetic syllabaries? Or is the fact that we have computers as a mediating tool going to forestall that and just make things weird?

[Macha]

IMEs have actually caused the opposite a little in Japanese, because you type the phonetic pronounciation and get a list of possible kanji, then with computer use "writing" kanji really means "recognising" and so people will use kanji that they never would have bothered with remembering how to handwrite.

[aarroyoc]

I'm just a Chinese student from the West so take it as just my two cents but I don't think it will evolve to phonetic syllabaries. Chinese has a lot of homophones so it's useful while reading to have an extra semantic meaning. They also say that once you're used to it, you read faster but at my level I can't confirm it. So with modern input devices you're basically simplifying the hard part of the characters, which is writing, and keeping the reading part where they're better than pure phonetic systems.