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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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from the longhorn story earlier: ;)
"Enderle said the new file system will also function efficiently with hard drives holding at least one terabyte of data. That's 1,000 gigabytes, or well over 1,000 compressed movies, or more than 700,000 novels the size of "War and Peace." Such drives are expected to hit the market by 2004."
i hope 8 years more can give a couple more megs to hds
Smile... tomorrow will be worse.
what on that list is impressive? He could've at least gone out on a small limb and mentioned fuel-cells.
Brevity is the soul of wit
-- Polonius
I'm already always online on my IM services, but always in the N/A or away state.. People never know if I'm actually there, unless I talk back. I'm omnipresent, just not an accountant.. or something.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
The characters, in the interest of drama, usually furrowed their brows, looked up at no one in particular, and assumed a deeper, "commanding" tone to their voice when addressing the computer.
Perhaps the computer uses a recognition algorithm based on all these factors to know when someon is talking to "it." My cat apparently has similar algorithms programmed in- I can speak in a conversational tone all day, even to a telephone, and the cat won't respond- but the moment I assume my "talking to kitty" voice, it snaps to attention.
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.
One presumes that the communication did not go to everyone on the ship, only to be cut off when the word "Picard" was spoken. I always assumed the computer cached the outgoing communication until it was determined whom it was going to, and then retransmitted; the result should be a 1 second lag on the return to represent that, unless the computer subtly timeshifted the entire conversation to pad the lag into the spaces normally between words.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
I don't have any faith in speech recognition.
I'm already using it, and it drives me nuts. When I add money to my "pay and talk" cell phone account, I am forced to use their new (within the past couple of months) speech recognition menu. I am literally answering a robot's questions, and she makes me want to bang my phone on the closest solid structure near me.
Welcome to Rogers At&T pay as you go service, would you like to add money to your account today? Please say yes, or no.
Yes
I'm sorry, I didn't hear you, would you like to add money to your account today?
Yeeeees.
I'm trying to ask you a question. Please answer with yes or no.
YEEEEEES
this is the part where I wonder if swearing at the system will make it work. Maybe it recognizes "i said yes you piece of shit android" No it doesn't (I tried), but it usually takes about 5 tries, and I get into the "add money to my account menu" where i can then use the keypad (still) to enter in my P.I.N., new card number, etc.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
He obviously hasn't thought this one through; he's claiming that in 2012, anybody will be able to steal your credit card and then walk out of stores with anything they want, and there will be no impetus on the store to actually verify that it is you? Doesn't sound like a viable business model to me! Winona would then just claim that somebody stole her RFID and still steal from Saks!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I had great difficulty trying to explain to mobile phone companies that the idea of selling data on where their customers were was a non-starter businesswise.
The business problem comes into focus when you consider that politicians tend to be avaracious consumers of wireless technology (both the Bush and Gore campaigns used RIM pagers), they also have serious security concerns. The ones I talked to imediately realized that the technology would be abused by stalkers, nutcases and assasins.
I sure don't want my washing machine reporting back to its manufacturer, but I have no qualms with it determing, for itself, that it is no longer functioning under normal operational parameters.
I don't want my washing machine to call the manufacturer, but loging a problem with the home maintenance center would be OK. This is the sort of thing that Web services will be big for.
I think that devices will talk but they will talk inside the home first and any external communication will be with permission from the owner.
Having the washing machine tell me when it needs repair is not a killer app. A status light on the front panel can achieve the same result. But having the thing tell me when the cycle has completed and the clothes are ready to go into the dryer, that is useful - I am writing this three floors above the washing machine in the basement.
Equally, Negroponte's fridge that orders stuff itself is inescapably clueless. There are in fact 'fridges' of that type, we call them vending machines and lots of them are now wired to report their inventory levels so the guy in the truck knows when to go and fill them up.
However it would be reasonably usefull to be able to check the contents of the fridge from my handheld PC when I am in the store and wondering if I need to buy more OJ, milk, and eggs. I suspect that a usable system would involve weight sensors and perhaps some sort of barcode printer / scanner built onto the side of the fridge for the frozen stuff. Problem with any such system however is that the discipline required to use it tends to be too much for most.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
They're talking about squeezing HD-DVD onto the same physical medium, but using MPEG-4 compression
rather than the MPEG-2 currently used.
Isn't the max res of MPEG-4 short of what real HDTV requires? From what I understand a lot of people think trying to cram HD-TV onto a DVD-9 is going to lead to a lot of compromises in video quality.
From what I understand the majority of equipment manufacturers are pushing HD DVD as something with a blue led and 25 GB per layer.
only way out will be a longer human life... or a limitless human life.
This could be obtained within (10 years anybody?) our own life time artifically. Even if 500+ years from now the limits of science has been reached for natural humans, I'm sure within that time they would have figured out some way to increase the activity, density, and size of the human brain, allowing us to think just a little bit smarter than what we can today...
Even if we do not change the physical aspects of the human brain, I'm sure we would have eventually come to a better understanding as to how our brain functions, allowing us to at least enhance our own thinking process a little.
In the beginning of the century, you could write Nobel-prize class papers at 20.
Who says we can't? It is the upbringing that is limiting us. Having to sit in a public school in mindless classes and PE can really hold a child back from reaching their real potential.
teaching techniques improves over time, but even then, there will be a limit.
There is no limit. No one knows the final outcome of the human brain. With more development of brain-wave (thought pattern) recognition, the possibility of thought induction is there. Who needs a text book when you can download information into your own mind? The only type of teacher you would need would be a mentor of some sort to teach you ethics and how to harness the potential of your brain. We very far away from fully understanding the human brain... throughtout that quest, I'm sure we'll figure out ways of enhancing it.
Yes, in order to reach scientific breakthroughs we need a bit more effort compared to the past, but it does not mean that we will never reach a time when that will change. Let's just hope we don't kill species before we get to that point.
This is wrong, depending on your definition of "proper."
/perfect/ speech recognition, as well as speech understanding, which is also known as "The Natural Language Problem," as long as we are both copying and pasting from link you posted.
What's AI-complete is
The reason perfect speech recognition is AI-complete is that it requires perfect speech understanding to choose between homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings, such as to, too and two, or there, their and they're), and that problem is AI-complete.
Of course, most humans don't have perfect speech understanding, and hence also don't have perfect speech recognition.
Satisfactory speech recognition may indeed be as close as 2012. Maybe not, but it is possible. It has come a long way recently.
This has nothing to do with the Turing Test, and many people are of the belief that the Turing Test is a pretty silly milestone in AI anyway as it is a poorly formed, incredibly subjective measure of intelligence.
Passing the Turing Test is a matter of being able to fool a human into thinking you are human via a simple converstion, held with words only, sight-unseen. Some humans fail the Turing Test and some computers can already pass a limited variation of it.
Something that is AI-Complete is believed to require human-level intelligence to solve, and is an entirely different, and likely far more complicated problem.
Justin Dubs