Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wang!sununix!lws
From: lws@comm.WANG.COM (Lyle Seaman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: illiterate society
Message-ID: <1990Mar5.173358.25523@comm.WANG.COM>
Date: 5 Mar 90 17:33:58 GMT
References: <808@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Organization: Wang Labs, Platform Comms.
Lines: 44

raza@cs.hw.ac.uk (raz(a)) writes:

>Speech synthesis systems are already with us and speech recognition is
>improving all the time, within the next 100 years we can expect to see
>the arrival of machines whose main communication medium is speech (or
>iconic for the hearing impaired). Compare this with the advent of the
>pocket calculator, this was heralded as the first step towards an 
>innumerate society.

>What is the likelyhood of these developments leading to a society that
>is illiterate ? is it a bad thing ?  will this mean a reliance of our
>society on this kind of technology ?

If you say "mostly illiterate", might be.  But look at it this way.
 ** Why do we consider literacy a good thing? **
Well, it allows one-to-many information transfer, asynchronously, which is
crucial for communication, education, modern business, etc.  But is literacy
*intrinsically* good?  I think not.  If another technology comes along and
replaces written language, then it will only be because it is *more useful*
than written language.  And yes, we may become reliant on this kind of
technology, but we are already reliant on the telephone which has replaced
the role of written language considerably.  So what's wrong with reliance on
a technology?  A: Perhaps someday the technology may become unavailable.
What would we do then?  Well, what we would we do if telephones suddenly 
disappeared (unlikely)?  I imagine we'd write a lot more letters.  And
our society _would_ be different.  So I don't believe that society AS
WE NOW KNOW IT will rely on such a technology, I think that the society
produced as a result of the technology would unavoidably depend on it.

On the other hand, it is doubtful that speech technology alone could 
replace written language.  The bandwidth of the visual channel is so 
much greater than the bandwidth of the aural channel.  Yes, spoken 
language does convey certain  nuances that written language may fail to
convey (sarcasm, for instance).  But sarcasm is not usually an essential
feature of physics texts.  Being able to control the rate of assimilation
is very important to understanding information-dense subjects, being able
to back up and re-read a phrase or a paragraph, easily and quickly.

So in summary:
No, I don't think speech technology alone will cause wide-spread illiteracy.
But if some technology did do so, I don't think we would suffer by it.

Lyle.
lws%comm.wang.com@uunet.uu.net