Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!world.std.com!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Looking Backwards Message-ID: <9001031633.AA15608@world.std.com> Date: 3 Jan 90 16:33:31 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 47 Re: J Storrs Hall's predictions Well done. I think keyboards are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Once learned (and even if badly learned) they are still efficient communications devices. Voice &c will augment them just like the mouse has, but voice has two major drawbacks. First, it's just not accurate even if well understood, ever play the game "telephone"? There really is a lot of bit loss due to slurring etc no matter what you do, raw facts get miscommunicated. Second, and perhaps more importantly, you don't want offices full of people talking to their computers, it would be chaos or demand everyone have private offices, not likely. The virtual reality crowd, as you mention (datagloves etc) should start to have a big impact in the CAD/CAM and control areas soon (the dataglove is being developed by NASA, among others, to create virtual control rooms for the Space Station project.) Nintendo already has a (primitive) one so that's coming fast and no doubt will find its way into applications we're not yet even thinking of. Perhaps we'll start to see some serious entries in the artifical telepathy arena (barely noticeable devices allowing you to discretely communicate with others.) Robotics: I started this list lo so many years ago (about 3) with the (somewhat humorous) prediction that the first major commercial success of robotics would be as sex surrogates. I'll leave it at that. Another important application of robotics waiting to happen is reading things into computers. Specialized robots crawling about the stacks of libraries or through office files. Turning pages and scanning is major work, better to let a robot at it (these won't be terribly anthropomorphic, of course.) The common cold will not only still be a nuisance but will have been found to be critical to good health as it stimulates the immune system causing it to wipe out all sorts of other nasties in the process, house cleaning as it were. -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade | bzs@world.std.com 1330 Beacon St, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202 | {xylogics,uunet}world!bzs