Slashdot Mirror

We seize on them as examples of what technology can achieve, even though much of it is bent towards satisfying degraded needs. We are rich and bored, and have plenty of disposable income to spend on things that mildly titillate us.

I couldn't get to the NYT article, but I think I have a reasonable idea what it's about based on the excerpts I've read in various /. comments.

My understanding is that Gelernter had devised some kind of spiffy interface, sort of a post-GUI thingie, which might be cool in and of itself, except that Proffessor G. goes on to make utterly absurd claims about op systems being irrelevant.

Point One: when developing any kind of spiffy innovation (such as, to plug one of my own ideas, a Voice/Hand Motion Interface), the quality of the development environment is itself a crucial issue. Maybe some people like Visual Studio better than development facilities on the Mac or on Linux, but the issue is definately NOT "irrelevant."

Point Two: A truly innovative, order of magnitude better, ordinary-user oriented interface could easily have "killer ap" or "tipping point" type effects. Thus, if first implemented on a non-MS op system, it could be the lance that knocks Bill Gates off his horse.

that speech is unlikely to become the dominant way people connect with computers. (Leslie Walker - The Washington Post)

"It turns out speaking uses auditory memory, which is in the same space as your short-term and working memory," he adds.

What that means, basically, is that it's hard to speak and think at the same time. Shneiderman says researchers in his computer science lab discovered through controlled experiments that when you tell your computer to "page down" or "italicize that word" by speaking aloud, you're gobbling up precious chunks of memory -- leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It's easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about something else because hand-eye coordination uses a different part of the brain, the researchers concluded.

Of course, some things, like pointing, cannot easily be done with voice. That might account for the poor results of voice interfaces in the HCIL's research. The solution is to use voice in connection with some kind of pointing device -- a mouse, a hand, an eye-tracking device, etc.

In some situations it might be reasonable to let voice commands be the "clicks" for any kind of "unclickable" pointing device, such as eye movement recognition or the silver-dot head thingie mentioned in the article. (I discuss this idea in more detail here.)

Anway, a plug for some ideas I wrote up a few weeks ago: The Voice/Hand Motion Interface.

From the article:

Intuition tells us that it is meaningful to speak of Society as something greater than and distinct from the sum of individuals and families, just as it is meaningful to speak of the mind as something greater than and distinct from the sum of brain cells. Intuition appears to be correct.

That, however, should not provide a lot of comfort to liberals and progressives. They like the idea of Society because it is not an It but an Us, a group project. For them, Society can be built like a house, or guided like a child, by a community of enlightened activists and politicians who use their own intuition as a blueprint. Artificial societies suggest that real ones do not behave so manageably.

That might be the greatest value of these simulations. The impossibility of making truly accurate predictions suggests that large societies should be conservatively governed. Those of us who are interested in developing alternative societies should, in my opinion, start small, work slowly and hope to achieve something lasting over the course of generations. I discuss this sort of thing in my manifesto.

(I've written up a tangentially related idea in Voice/Hand Motion Interface.)