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5 Predictions for 2012
Structured Audio writes "Mike Langberg of the Merc put up his 5
technology predictions for 2012. Well
chosen, although of course in 2012 speech
recognition will still be 10 years away :-)."
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All present and accounted for -- always. ...
Family, friends and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you are,
I think this will come much sooner and, by 2012, will be gone again once everyone realises how bloody awful it is.
I had a direct broadcast satellite in '92, so did over a million people in the UK. Predicting the launch in the US is hardly that impressive.
This years predictions include the Tivo like PVR becomming ubiquitous...
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I can see it happening to some extent - I mean, the algorithms used are really unreliable, but given time, I can see it becoming usable. However, I take issue with the way he think it will be presented. AI will not be advanced enough, IMHO. You won't say "How far to nearest gas station", you will probably be more limited in how you can ask your question. It might be close to "Car, distance to gas station, nearest" or some other limited syntax. I preface it with 'car' because you have to have some way to let the car know the question is directed at it.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I would guess it is also possible for networks to start doing what they do during soccer games when they can't take breaks -- scroll the add on top of the programming. You could be watching Friends, with a little "Pampers" ad on the bottom. This would allow for even more commercial time, and they could sell the time to sync to various moments in a program. (e.g Rachel is playing with the baby, roll the Pampers ad. They are in the coffeehouse, roll the Starbucks ad)
Another thing that can happen is a'la sports programming. At various times during the program, the picture would shrink, making enough space for an ad to be displayed alongside. Some people will put up with this if it means free, and you can't skip the commercials.
See, aren't ya'll glad I'm not a network exec.
If it goes away, good riddance. They have to be careful with subscription fees.. commercial TV is mostly crap, so it is hard to price it correctly. All my local stations together would probably be worth about $7/mo to me if they were to be commercial free. Can they make money with that?
The Internet is everywhere -- and nowhere.
;-)
This will take at least 15 years. People don't buy new washing machines all that often.
All present and accounted for -- always.
This will be in mobile phones within 5 years.
Walk now, pay later.
Probably unfeasible as described. More likely you will authorize payment for the item before putting it in the bag. The receiver at the entryway will only check that you don't leave with any unpaid items. 10 years is about right, I wager.
Prime time is your time
Not very adventurous there. 5 more years.
Finally, we can talk to our computers
People curse them every day, so this is already reality.
I doubt true voice control will be there in 10 years either, unless there is a major break through in AI technology. Before that, we will be limited to simple voice keyed activation.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
What does speech recognition have to do with the Turing test? I will consider speech recognition to be a solved problem when computers can take dictation with the same error rate as a native speaker. They don't have to be able to understand what is said--that's a different problem altogether.
That would mean that internet connectivity has to be wireless and cheap. It would also require people to WANT their appliances connected to the internet. I'm sorry but my washing machine works really well right now on it's own without it bugging me to take it in or yelling adds at me. If that's why these machines want to connect (to rip me off, advertise to me, tell me i should take it into the dealer and pay more money) then I'm gonna be ready with a nice jamming signal for them.
2. The IM prediction and online presence.
Maybe it will be like somewhat as he says. But I sure as hell am not going to have a damn gps signal telling everyone who wants to talk to me exactly where I am. And I'm not gonna be available all the time either. My settings are gonna default to "leave me a god damn email msg and I'll get back to you when I can". Not 'here's my exact location, what I'm doing and 5 ways to page me right now'. :)
3. Walking out of shops and the rfid tag nonsense.
Riiight. A store with no clerks. Talk about easy to shoplift if you have your own programmable rfids. or just walk out next to someone else and charge your stuff to their card.
4. Tivo in every home, no restrictions.
Let's see if the mpaa + networks will just roll over for that one. My guess is it will be a crippled tivo ripoff with all sorts of DRM and palladium inside if that happens. Anything else will be illegal.
5. Speech recognition.
Don't know about this one. Everyone and their mother has thought this was right around the corner for the past 20 years.
Here's my prediction:
Corporate America will finally dispense with the play acting and be in direct control of the country. Instead of having senators from each constituency, we will have senator Disney, senator Microsoft, senator Tobacco industry, senator chemical industry. And the president will be the CEO of the country.
Liberty.
They're talking about squeezing HD-DVD onto the same physical medium, but using MPEG-4 compression rather than the MPEG-2 currently used. Now, assuming that a DVD can hold 9 gigabytes and a necessary minimum capacity of two hours, that's about 4.5 gigabytes per hour. That gives about 220 hours of storage.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
That sounds kind of silly. Would be kind of like the grocery store calling me up and telling me I was low on milk. Yes... it would be great to know that my washing machine is using too much hot water... but the washing machine should tell me, and not Sears.
Sex - Find It
All his assumptions are based pretty much on what we TODAY consider to be desired. The fact is, in 10 years, we'll have changed our perspective so that such things, once past the gee-wiz phase, have evolved into more mainstream appliances, that do what we want them to do, and more importantly ONLY what we want them to do.
:) But better than the embarrasing situation where you've accidently labeled yourself a criminal because you misplaced that package of bubblegum when you were shopping.
:)
Everyone doesn't have a cellphone..... yet, but it seems to be getting that way quickly. You can't walk down an asile in the supermarket without seeing someone talking on the phone, usually about some useless, pointless conversation that is only occupying what free brain cells they have left, and leaving very little, if any, available for any other purpose, like not blocking the asile, or applying the brakes in an orderly fashion. More and more places are banning active cellphone use, mostly to appeal to the customers that find others yelling into the cellphone during a movie to be somewhat disruptive. And those of us who value our privacy will venture away from the option to be located anywhere at any time. The feature might exist, but very few people will probably use it, unless its necessary.
RFID tags are great, and it makes sense to simply walk out the door and have your credit card deducted for the right amount as you do. And if you accidently walk out with something you're not supposed to, it will let you know. If it was a simple accident, you have the option to walk back in. If it wasn't, you can still run..
Cable already SHOULD be advertising free. You're paying a monthly fee for the shows, you should get them without advertising. And if not for the advertising, they shouldn't care when, or how many times you watch something. As long as you keep dishing out the monthly fee, and you will, it should make little, if any difference. Its the dependance on advertising that's biting the cable networks in the ass, hence their bitter complaints about Tivo and the like. Rid themselves of the advertising beast, embrace the PVR, restructure their budget, and life will be good.
As for voice recognition, we got that today. Of course, there's an AI element that's lacking, but if the driver is willing to stick to a standard convention for command structure, most of what the author is predicting in 10 years could be done today with little difficulty. The simple fact of the matter is, 99% of the time, I know where the nearest gas station is. Only travellers need this information, and most intellegent travellers will fill up at the most convienent opportunity (i.e., not when they have 10 miles worth of gas left) Better for the car to simply inform me as I'm passing a gas station, knowing my destination and most likely route, that the gas station I'm passing is the least expensive one I will pass before running out of gas and therefore I should stop now to fill up. Screw asking the car about it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
You have a great point here.
I'm waiting for Americans to decide which technologies give them more or better personal time, and which technologies invade and destroy it.
Cellphones can be a blessing. They can also be a way for our employers to extend office hours through dinner and bedtime.
Instant messaging has become a burden to me. Being available all the time for any priority of message is like moving your office desk or living room couch to the mall.
I want nothing to do with people-tracking technology. The folks I care to know where I am during my day do. I don't want strangers, the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, or the Bush Administration tracking my movements as if I'm some sort of migratory animal, thank you.
Let's make toolks for the workers, rather than turning the workers into tools.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Leave your phone at home?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Another interesting question about the ST computer- how did it route the person-to-person commnications before the individual spoke the receipient's name? You'd often here Picard's communicator pipe up: "Riker to Picard- you should come up to the bridge," or some such line.
That one's easy. They do it the same way that you do, they have a time delay loop where things that haven't been processed are buffered, and they don't start forwarding the message until enough has been parsed to identify the recipient. They may also compress whitespace during catchup so that it doesn't even add any delay into the process. (Whitespace compression during speech can usually recover over 25% of the used time, so catchup would be trivial on any except the shortest messages [where it wouldn't matter anyway].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So, let's say:
I live 70 years
I watch 5 movies per week (2 hours each)
one hour of high-definition movie is about 2 GB Then, in my entire life, I will consume something like 70 TB of data. Of course, maybe there will be 3D-surround immersion imaging devices... But eventually, we will be able to store locally all the information we can consume and produce. Storing more will be useless. Eventually, we will reach a point where more and better technology will be useless.
:-)
This reminds me something I read a long time ago: Knowledge Crash. Science progresses. It takes more and more time to reach the bleeding edge of science and improve on it. In the beginning of the century, you could write Nobel-prize class papers at 20. Now, you need to be a little bit older. Eventually, to improve on science, you will need a life-long study. And we will reach a point where human life will not be long enough to improve on humanity's knowledge. I know, teaching techniques improves over time, but even then, there will be a limit. The only way out will be a longer human life... or a limitless human life. But until Kurzweil's dream (read this too) become a reality, both technology and knowledge crashes are part of our future - and more technology will not be usefull anymore...
I wonder what kind of society we will live in then... and what being human will mean.
What does speech recognition have to do with the Turing test?
Proper speech recognition has been proven to be AI-complete, similar to "The Vision Problem" (building a system that can see as well as a human), and many others. Perhaps not proven as rigorously as mathematical theorems but all data is pointing this way.
Therefore, correctly solving the speech recognition problem is equivalent to solving the Turing test. So if anybody predicts good speech recognition in some near future, it is usually a sign of uninformedness and that person probably shouldn't be taken seriously.
When men used to be men
Here is a hint: just because the phone rings does not mean you have to answer it. In fact if there is someone physically in your presense it is IMPOLITE to answer the phone unless you are expecting an emergency. (Your wife could go into labor at anytime, your parent is going in for heart surgery, your kid is late in bad weather. There are others, but those are the big ones)
If I'm in your cube and you answer the phone I will talk to your boss about that, unless you are in customer service they can get voicemail and you will call back.
Many people are surprized that I, a strong introvert like my cell phone. They don't realise that I'm not a slave to the phone, the phone is my slave. If I'm sitting between two beatiful girls and it rings, I hit cancle without even looking at it. (As a geek I've so far had one such opportunity, I might have blown it, but it wasn't by answering the phone) Manytimes when I could answer it I will just look at callerid and send the caller to voicemail.
Not necessarily... Back at the turn of the century, there were 'doctors', and 'surgeons'. Now, there are hand surgeons, internists, gynacologists, eye/ear/nose guys, etc. Likewise, there used to be 'physicists', and shortly afterward there were 'theoretical physicists'... now there are high energy physicists, quantum physicists, particle physicists, etc.
Take any profession... expand it, through more knowledge and technology... you get to the point where you can have people specialize in barely-overlapping fields within the same industry - computer programmers vs. computer engineers vs. network engineers vs. helpdesk trolls, etc. Can your average programmer design a chip? Can your average chip designer program a GUI?
To view it another way, the age of the Renaissance man is well over... instead, we get the age of the specialized man, with more expertise in a chosen profession than any renasissance man could hope for.
-T