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 »

Since my friend Richard was kind enough to refer people my way before writing his well-thought out refutation of my iPad/Star Trek article, it’s only fair that I refer you back to said refutation.

[Original article]

Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…

Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD.

Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world engineers. Communicators have already completely infiltrated our real-world lives–we call them cellphones. Flat panel displays are now so common it’s getting hard to remember when televisions took up significant cubic volume and not just rectangular area. Tricorders…well, we’ve got a way to go on that one, because we’re nowhere near the necessary technology for that kind of magical scanning. But they’re working on it.

PADDs, however, are in reach of our real-world technology, and the iPad seems to be consciously trying to make them a reality. The way PADDs have been portrayed, even as far back as Classic Trek¹ gives us some insight, I believe, into how Apple envisions the iPad being used.

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For those of you who have been living in a Google-proof shelter this week, Google introduced its latest toy, Buzz, this week. Superficially, Buzz operates a lot like Twitter, or like Facebook’s status page, in that you’re encouraged to share your fleeting thoughts with your crowd.

However, in my opinion, it so far has several significant advantages over either Twitter or Facebook. Enough so that it’s already looking like it might overtake both for me, personally, as my preferred source and sink of “short-form” communication. I also think that it scores big over Google’s other collaborative experiment, Wave.

Read on for my pros and cons… To be explicit, in each section, “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” below all are from Buzz’s point of view.

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Today on Twitter there’s a tag-meme, #10yearsago. It’s not all that unexpected, given that we’re coming up on another round-number year, but it has special significance to many, because, of course, in 2000, there was a chance that we were facing the End of the World as we Knew It™.

We were wrong, of course, but not far wrong. The disaster we all expected never came to pass, but 21 months later, a different chain of events really did sort of change the shape of our world rather significantly.

But I digress.

On the off chance that someone reading this was living on a desert island that year, or was simply too young to remember, here’s a quick summary of what was generally called the Y2K problem:

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