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Listening again to the episode of Are We Alone listed with this post. The guest speaking now is William Crossman. He is talking about his belief that talking computers will replace reading and writing by 2050.
His claim as I understand it is that verbal and oral communication will be facilitated by computers such that there is no need for being able to read or to write, and the population overall will become functionally illiterate. This, he is advocating as literacy being superseded, and humans as a naturally oral computer, not issuing a warning of the dangers ahead.
I think this is it and that I have conveyed what is going on but... the show is still playing and it is really difficult for me to think or to focus. Which brings me to the point of this post: no, please no. Although Crossman indicated several times that signing would be something these computers could handle, so that deaf people would be able to participate, and although he talks about making communication and access easier for people with disabilities who are not well able to write or read, the elimination of text from society would make things much harder for me and probably for a great many other people.
There is a reason I tend to skip podcasts when they come on in my playlists and, increasingly, songs with words. Verbal communication tends to shut me down. Hearing voice very often has a nearly paralytic effect on me as processing it often takes away my ability to do anything else and I tend not to be able to ignore it enough to be able to function. Speech too can be difficult for me, taking a long time to find and to say words, especially if I am under any stress. Unless I am so stressed I begin babbling and not making sense.
Text, reading and writing, are far easier for me. I tend to lose words as soon as I hear them; often I retain the sense of it but often also I need to ask people to repeat themselves one or a few times. It is not rare for voices to be unpleasant or painful to hear, though generally I can block out this fact. In text I tend to be more fluent in conversation, or better able to pick up again if something has happened and I lost focus, because the words are right there for me to read again and respond to.
Auditory and verbal difficulties are I believe common among people on the autism spectrum. Most of the time I pass for neurotypical and manage fine, but the impression I have is that I am about as verbal as it gets. The world Crossman envisions would severely hamper my ability to communicate and access information, but many others would be worse off.
His claim as I understand it is that verbal and oral communication will be facilitated by computers such that there is no need for being able to read or to write, and the population overall will become functionally illiterate. This, he is advocating as literacy being superseded, and humans as a naturally oral computer, not issuing a warning of the dangers ahead.
I think this is it and that I have conveyed what is going on but... the show is still playing and it is really difficult for me to think or to focus. Which brings me to the point of this post: no, please no. Although Crossman indicated several times that signing would be something these computers could handle, so that deaf people would be able to participate, and although he talks about making communication and access easier for people with disabilities who are not well able to write or read, the elimination of text from society would make things much harder for me and probably for a great many other people.
There is a reason I tend to skip podcasts when they come on in my playlists and, increasingly, songs with words. Verbal communication tends to shut me down. Hearing voice very often has a nearly paralytic effect on me as processing it often takes away my ability to do anything else and I tend not to be able to ignore it enough to be able to function. Speech too can be difficult for me, taking a long time to find and to say words, especially if I am under any stress. Unless I am so stressed I begin babbling and not making sense.
Text, reading and writing, are far easier for me. I tend to lose words as soon as I hear them; often I retain the sense of it but often also I need to ask people to repeat themselves one or a few times. It is not rare for voices to be unpleasant or painful to hear, though generally I can block out this fact. In text I tend to be more fluent in conversation, or better able to pick up again if something has happened and I lost focus, because the words are right there for me to read again and respond to.
Auditory and verbal difficulties are I believe common among people on the autism spectrum. Most of the time I pass for neurotypical and manage fine, but the impression I have is that I am about as verbal as it gets. The world Crossman envisions would severely hamper my ability to communicate and access information, but many others would be worse off.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 02:38 (UTC)From:Who would do the programming and maintenance of those systems?
What would happen when the power fails?
What about the uncountable numbers of books and other printed materials in archives and the like?
What about those people who are deliberately luddites and eschew "modern" conveniences?
What about labels, warnings, shop signs, high noise environments, and many other places where computer speech wouldn't be practical?
I think that his prediction will not come true anytime soon.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 03:18 (UTC)From:We managed a society without electricity for quite a while. As it stands, technology like e-books, laptops, etc. and the ubiquity of computers at work means that "power failure" is quite crippling as is. I presume people would huddle about and play Monopoly and socialize like they do these days :)
Archives can be converted to new materials - witness scanners uploading them to digital formats already. Once the text is digital, you can have a program "read it out loud." (This does run in to the issue that a saved audio file is much larger, and a text-to-speech converter runs much slower, but... have you seen Windows Vista? Efficiency isn't a goal of modern computing! :D)
Luddites will always exist. I'm sure there were people eschewing literacy for quite some time, and still are today. Equally, there'll be people who cling to the elitist attitude that a "real book" is somehow better than an "e-book" or having your computer read you a bed time story. Heck, the re-emergence of the oral tradition would probably be a plus in some minds :)
As to the high-noise environments... yeah. That's where audio sucks ass. It is good at conveying basic environmental data, and at most a single coherent linguistic concept at a time. There's ways around it, but it highlights exactly WHY the visual-channel (text) is preferred over the audio-channel (sound) in our culture. Prices only require knowledge of numbers, which are probably still around for math anyways. Signs can be done the old fashioned way: Symbols and logos.
If we really wanted to degenerate in to a more primitive medium, we've got the resources to pull it off. The question isn't practicality so much as "are you bloody insane? Why would you want to DO THAT?" :)
no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 03:11 (UTC)From:Imagine a future where your computer can play-out-loud your IM conversation, and give you a visualization (including notes and lyrics) of music files. Where you can get a phone call, and have it transcribed to IM, then respond in text.
Heck, imagine playing a video game where your skin gets warmer as you take damage, so that you don't have to visually process that data.
THAT is what I'm looking forward to, and I still think it's absurd to expect kinetic-feedback systems any time soon.
And if the future gets to the point where every storefront sign and price label is audio-only, I will be founding a cult around books and the dark lord Literacy :P
no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 07:09 (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-08-17 15:26 (UTC)From:And I agree with
Hope it makes sense. I just woke up, words seem vague and slippery.