In 1968, John Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, a sprawling attempt to predict life in a desperately overcrowded year 2010. It grew out of the same meme pool as Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room (which in turn became the movie Soylent Green) and Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside, all if which build on fears of what life on Earth will be like if population is allowed to continue to grow unchecked.

It’s a book I’m deeply fond of, but the closer we’ve gotten to 2010, the more its predictive flaws become apparent. Manhattan is not covered by a giant geodesic dome; internal combustion has not been outlawed; eugenics remains off the table; marijuana is not legal, and tobacco is not illegal. And of course, he completely failed to predict–but then, who did, really–the advent of the microchip and the resulting revolution. We are caught up in an endless war, but it’s not over communism, not in East Asia, and there is no draft.

On the other hand, he essentially predicted CNN and its ilk (in the form of Engrelay Satleserv) and some of the corrosive effect 24/7 news coverage would have, not to mention the accelerating consumer culture. He predicted augmented reality, albeit not in the mobile form we’re coming to know it, in the form of Mr and Mrs Everywhere — a modification for your TV that allows travelogue shows and news programs to substitute your own image for the show’s hosts. The social trend of relative strangers sharing apartments in the big cities–especially New York–has definitely come to pass. While it’s not as prevalent in the real world as in the novel, he predicted that there would be people sufficiently alienated from their world by modern pressures to go on massive killing sprees. While the world’s population has not quite reached the numbers he predicted, they’re not far off.

And although we have not had quite the panicked reaction he predicted, we’re awfully close to some of the genetic breakthroughs that are central to the book.

Anyway, this is not intended as a full review, although I may reread the book soon and do just that. It’s really meant to commemorate that today, 3 May 2010, is the date the book begins. I still commend the book to anyone with the patience to read through a 1960s view of what 2010 might be like.

I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon.

The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert Fortner. I don’t know who Mr Fortner is, honestly, but that doesn’t matter to me much. I mean, not a lot of people know who I am, either, and that doesn’t keep me from venturing opinions I hope people will find interesting

ANYWAY, the gist of Mr Fortner’s article is that, bluntly, speech recognition is a failed technology, and possibly an impractical one for the foreseeable future. Despite 40 years or so of research, despite Google releasing a corpus of a trillion words to feed to recognition engines, speech recognition accuracy has more or less topped out at 80%, and stalled there for over a decade. No really serious research seems to be ongoing either into existing approaches or into completely new ones. The longstanding belief that, if we could teach computers language, that would lead to AI, is being turned on its head, with some people now certain that, without true AI, computers will never really understand language.

It’s a disappointing conclusion, but one that I can’t really disagree with. Continue Reading »