Читать книгу VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out - William Crossman - Страница 8

It’s a cool Thursday morning in March, 2050. The family’s voice-in/voice-out—VIVO—computers begin to serenade Kathy and her children, Mary Beth and Thomas, with wake-up music. Their VIVOs, like all talking computers in 2050, lack keyboards because information exchange is text-free. Data and commands are inputted by voice; outputted data is heard and seen, but not read.

This morning, however, the serenading VIVOs don’t appear to be heard by Kathy and the children. No one is budging. Getting up at 7:00 a.m. in the year 2050 isn’t any easier than it was in 2005. After five minutes, with everyone still in bed, the VIVOs change their music menu to something louder and livelier. Five more minutes go by without anyone stirring.

Now the computers get serious, junking their musical approach for some strong verbal encouragement. Kathy hates hearing this particular spoken message because it mimics the words and tone that her own parents used to use to wake her when she was a child—which is exactly why Kathy programmed their VIVOs with that message. Ten seconds of the VIVOs’ parental scolding is enough to pry everyone out of bed.

Kathy starts to ask her VIVO what time it is but has a coughing fit instead, so she glances over at the visual time display on her VIVO’s screen. Lacking written numerals, it shows the 07:10 time as , utilizing four glowing LORNS (location relative numeral substitutes). No written numerals? Not to worry. It’s 2050!

Kathy, Mary Beth, and Thomas shower, dress, and, head to the kitchen for breakfast. Thomas reaches for the cereal box and fills his bowl. The box is covered with eye-catching holographics, but no writing, no words. None of the other food packaging on the table has writing on it either. Along with its graphics, each package sports a brand-identification symbol and, in place of the old 20th Century bar code, Kathy’s DNA code, which allows the food suppliers to electronically fill, price, bill, and deliver the goods that Kathy ordered online using her VIVO. Neither Thomas nor Mary Beth has ever read a cereal box.

The absence of written language isn’t limited to the time display on Kathy’s bedside VIVO and the food packaging in the kitchen. This family’s apartment is no different from most other families’ apartments in mid-21st Century electronically-developed countries: written language doesn’t appear anywhere. Like almost all of their neighbors, co-workers, and schoolmates, Kathy, Mary Beth, and Thomas can’t read or write.

Neither twelve-year-old Mary Beth, who is finishing her last year of college, nor Thomas, age 4, who is completing fifth grade, has ever learned to write or read. Kathy’s schools didn’t teach writing or reading either, but thinking that it would be fun to learn, she joined an extra-curricular Written Language Club for a year when she was ten and became quite expert at writing and reading.

Now, though, she has forgotten almost all the written language that she learned because she hasn’t practiced or used it in over twenty-five years. Kathy keeps telling her friends that if her children ever decided to take up reading and writing as a hobby, then maybe she’d join them and get back into it again. Uh-huh, Kathy, we’ll believe it when we see it.

When breakfast is over, Kathy moves to her favorite chair and asks her satellite-driven VIVO to recite her new messages and display their accompanying graphics on her wall screen. Kathy finds it hard to believe that, only forty-five years ago, people were still writing and reading e-mail and letter carriers were still placing letters in people’s home mailboxes.

After she listens to her messages, Kathy will spend the rest of the morning at home working at her job: mentally composing her daily online spoken “op-ed column” and then reciting it into her VIVO. She’s amused that her daily “journalistic” recitations are still referred to in the old 20th Century print terms, but her bosses at the Daily Post Access believe that promoting her spoken pieces as “op-ed columns” adds a quaint touch that attracts a larger audience. The irony is that very few of the people who regularly access Kathy’s views on the Daily Post Access even know what the words “op-ed” or “column” (not to mention “Post” or “journalistic”) mean or refer to.

Mary Beth checks her new messages on her wrist VIVO and on the tiny flipdown graphics monitor lodged in her cap’s visor, then waves goodbye, rushes out the door, jumps on her bicycle, and heads off to soccer practice. Her backpack is stuffed with her shin guards and cleats, her lunch, and her hand drum. After lunch, she and her friends will spend the afternoon at the community’s Nature Preserve Park helping to care for the plants and animals, improvising music together, and just hanging out. Mary Beth prefers to wait until after dinner to log onto her college classes, using her online VIVO wall monitor at home to see and talk with her professors and college classmates.

Thomas wants to go swimming at the community pool in the afternoon, so he decides to do his schoolwork this morning. Logging onto the VIVO wall unit near his bed, he joins a Comparative Cosmology class that’s comparing a 5000-year-old Nubian theory of the universe, Albert Einstein’s 145-year-old Theory of Relativity, and Benita Lopez’s most recent revision (2048) of the Unified Field Theory. After a few seconds online, Thomas is debating the pros and cons of the various theories with his teacher and schoolmates, and storing on his VIVO the parts of the discussion that he’ll want to re-access.

After Kathy’s “column” and Thomas’ schoolwork are finished, they get into their electromagnetic hovercar and head to Kathy’s mother’s apartment for lunch and a visit. As they pull away from the curb, Kathy speaks her password to the car’s VIVO computer, placing the car’s motion functions under the control of the regional AUTOLINK system. Kathy tells the VIVO that their destination is her mother’s apartment; then, she and Thomas lean back and relax. VIVO and AUTOLINK take over from there.

Along the roads and expressways that Kathy’s car is traveling, there are no written signs designating street names, expressway exits, or speed limits. They’re not necessary since the car’s movement is being electronically controlled and its location constantly monitored by satellites. If Kathy wants to know the name of the street they are on, she will just ask her VIVO. As a visual backup, their VIVO monitor displays their trip both as an icon moving along a (wordless) roadmap and as an actual satellite view of their car moving along the highway.

At times, Kathy asks her VIVO to comment on traffic and weather conditions, street names and numbers, speed limits, and points of interest along the route. At other times, she glances at the car’s speed, RPMs, and energy level depicted as bar graphs—no written numerals here either—located on her car’s dashboard. Of course, Kathy always keeps the VIVO’s spoken-graphic interrupt function turned on to alert her of any immediate or impending mechanical failures, traffic problems, or weather emergencies.

And no billboard words in sight! True, there are plenty of roadside billboards, though they aren’t really boards, and no bills are posted on them. They are, in fact, giant VIVO display screens teeming with moving visual ads and corporate logos. If Kathy and Thomas wish, they can access the billboards’ spoken messages through their car’s VIVO, but right now Kathy prefers her VIVO to be quiet while she chats with Thomas about his schoolwork and their visit with Grandma Marie.

As they pull up in front of her mother’s house, Kathy—as usual—reminds Thomas not to speak too quickly when he talks to Grandma Marie. What Kathy considers speed-speaking is becoming Thomas’ ordinary speaking style, and Kathy isn’t too happy about it. Thomas assures Kathy that he’ll try to, in his words, “keep my voice-out” slow enough for Grandma to understand. They ring the doorbell, walk in, and find Grandma Marie sitting at the kitchen table reading a novel and sipping coffee.

Grandma Marie learned to read as a child in school in the 1980s and got hooked on it. After college, she taught Spanish to high schoolers for twenty-five years but took early retirement when her school district—deciding that VIVOs had made foreign-language study unnecessary—dropped her courses from the curriculum. Afterward, Grandma Marie free-lanced as an aloud-reader, transferring difficult-to-scan pre-21st Century manuscripts onto VIVO networks. But she eventually lost that job, too, to advancing technology when even the most difficult hand-written materials were able to be electronically scanned onto VIVO networks, and the last generation of aloud-readers was laid off.

Reading, along with long-distance running, has continued as Grandma Marie’s favorite pastime, but she has been having a harder and harder time finding books to read. Every couple of months, she orders more books through her online Antiques Shopping Network, but she can barely afford her beloved books anymore as they’ve become rarer and their prices have escalated.

Grandma Marie fills three bowls with hot soup and, as always, asks Thomas how his classes are coming along. As Thomas, taking care to speak slowly, describes his classes, Grandma Marie looks at Kathy and exclaims, “Einstein? In the fifth grade? For four-year-olds?” As they eat, Grandma Marie recalls how home schooling and distance-learning by computer were just starting to become popular in the 1980s and 1990s—too late to affect her own education. “Just lucky, I guess,” she jokes.

Grandma Marie notices Thomas looking at the words on the pages of her open novel, and she bites her tongue. She has strong feelings about the fact that her grandchildren can’t read or write, but, after numerous heated conversations with Kathy urging her to introduce the children to reading and writing, Grandma Marie has decided to let the issue drop—at least for now.

After lunch, Kathy and Thomas say goodbye to Grandma Marie. Kathy drops Thomas off at the swimming pool and goes home for a bicycle ride around her neighborhood.

At , Thomas, his friend TaShawn, and TaShawn’s father, who picked the boys up at the pool, walk in the door. Thomas asks Kathy if TaShawn can stay for dinner, spend the night, and log onto school with Thomas in the morning. Kathy agrees. TaShawn’s dad is just on his way out the door when Mary Beth breezes in. As Kathy, Mary Beth, and Thomas prepare dinner, Mary Beth entertains her family and TaShawn with stories about the animals and plants she and her friends cared for at Nature Preserve Park.

Mary Beth has always loved nature and natural things, which is why she took her old-style acoustic hand drum to the park. She describes how she jammed for hours with her friends, some of them playing acoustic instruments while others, wearing electrode-filled headbands, made music by mind-playing their thoughts and feelings.

Dinner is followed by the usual ten minutes of clean-up chores around the apartment: putting dinner dishes and soiled clothes into their respective ultrasound machines, telling the robot vacuum units to clean the floors and carpets, voice-activating the self-cleaning mechanisms on the showers, toilets, and sinks in the bathrooms, and putting away the piles of clutter. Then Mary Beth heads to her desk VIVO for an evening of college classes, while Thomas and TaShawn play games on Thomas’ VIVO.

Kathy spends the last few hours before bedtime in front of her bedroom VIVO’s display monitor, first logging onto the Daily Post Access to see what visuals the Daily’s visuals editor selected to accompany the “op-ed column” she inputted that morning, then catching the world news and talking to a couple of friends. Finally, she adjusts her VIVO’s voice-out speed to a higher WPM (words per minute) setting, turns off the monitor, and spends the last half-hour of her day lying on her bed, eyes closed, listening to a complete longstory—they were called “novels” back in the 20th Century when people still wrote and read them—on one of the many longstory networks.

OK, there you have it. A day in the life of an oral-culture family. It’s also a utopian fantasy about a privileged middle-class family living at a time of relative peace and security in an electronically-developed capitalist society in the year 2050.

Based on what our world is like today at the start of the 21st Century, is such a mid-21st Century scenario even remotely possible? Might there really be places on Earth like this place where Kathy, Mary Beth, and Thomas live—communities where life is this pleasant, this free of war, poverty, violence, crime, hate, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, abuse, disease, and environmental destruction? I doubt it.

But I do think that this one-day slice of Kathy’s family’s life will prove to be accurate in one respect: in the year 2050, in the electronically-developed countries, no one—except perhaps Grandma Marie, a declining number of her fellow book hobbyists, and a handful of linguists, historians, academic “literacists,” and archeologists—will be writing or reading. They won’t need to—which is why writing and reading are headed toward extinction. To the extent that VIVO technology is now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, rapidly being developed and is almost in place, writing and reading are already technologically obsolete and will soon be functionally obsolete.

Welcome to the new oral culture of the 21st Century. We’re quickly moving—being forced to move by the technologies which we ourselves are creating and setting in motion for this very purpose—into an age of oral-aural communication and information storage and retrieval.

Why do I think there’s an oral culture in our future? Look at the clues in our present.

• Billions of people are nonliterate or functionally nonliterate and, therefore, cannot use ordinary text-driven computers—even if they could get hold of them. There is a growing worldwide need and demand for computers that can speak and be spoken to, and there is a computer industry eager to supply that demand.

• Most of the world’s nations do not have the enormous resources and/or motivation required to make their populations truly literate.

• For decades, among young people in the industrialized, electronically-developed countries, the amount of writing and reading has declined overall, and young people’s literacy skills have either declined or remained extremely low.

• Most young people prefer communicating, storing, and retrieving information orally-aurally and non-text visually, using the full range of electronic devices, from telephones to computers, already available.

• The technology for building effective VIVO computers is almost in place. Research and development of speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech understanding is soaring as more and more government, corporate, and university research facilities throw their resources into the creation of VIVOs.

• The voice-recognition technology that allows simultaneous translation of spoken languages from one language to another is in place. And the software that translates speech into on-screen 3-D sign language is here.

• McDonald’s golden arches, Nike’s swoosh, and the hundreds of other traffic, travel, medical, commercial, and informational symbols and icons, understandable to billions of people internationally, are rapidly replacing written words.

• Computer software symbols and icons have become recognizable to today’s computer users: Microsoft “Word’s” W, Apple’s , diskette and folder icons, Internet smiley symbols :-) and :-(.

• Some watches and clocks with “faces” and “hands” no longer have numerals or timekeeping marks of any kind written on them.

• New voice-activated and voice-controlled electronic devices and appliances, including home and car security systems, home heating and cooling systems, coffee makers, alarm clocks, VCR and DVD players, phone message machines, electronic pocket-sized organizers and datebooks, and phone calling-cards are flowing into the marketplace. They’re being joined by:

• The flood of new electronic devices and appliances that can speak back to us.

• The zooming number of magazines, newspapers, and books available on audiocassettes, on CDs, and digitally online using voice-recognition technology.

• The new mobile/wireless digital telephony, voice portals, VoiceXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language)—the vocal equivalent of HTML (HyperText Markup Language)—and phone-casting, modeled on TV-radio broadcasting, a media network of Internet audio channels available to any telephone.

• WAP (wireless application protocol) allows users to browse the World Wide Web by speaking into cellular phones and other mobile devices. Faster radio-driven applications already threaten to replace WAP.

• Voice-controlled “infotainment” systems in cars and trucks with links to the Internet.

• Singer/entertainer Prince who temporarily replaced his name with a single written glyph, leaving his fans wondering what to call him.

• The tattoos, piercings, scarifications, graffiti tags, and similar graphic symbols that many people in electronically-developed countries are displaying as expressions of their identities.

• The counterpersons at fast-food restaurants who take orders by punching keys bearing pictures of, rather than the words for, Big Macs, large fries, and medium Cokes.

• The restaurant waitpersons who use handheld computers to punch in coded symbols indicating customers’ orders to the chefs and bartenders. Their computers also calculate the bill—and the tip.

• The POS (point of sale) computers that are beginning to replace supermarket checkers.

• The huge worldwide popularity of rap and hip-hop, and the growing audiences for other types of spoken-word and performance poetry.

• Electronic books: a mere step away from electronic talking “books.”

• Voice-driven e-mail has arrived and has started to replace written e-mail. Finally, chat rooms where people really chat.

• The electronic dog and cat doors that open by being activated only by a particular animal’s voice. And the electronic people doors at offices and elevators that open only to a particular human’s voice. Voiceprints: we are what we speak.

To paraphrase a line from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: you don’t need a weather man to know which way readin’ ‘n’ writin’s blowin’.