🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Mar5.173358.25523@comm.WANG.COM> lws@comm.WANG.COM (Lyle
Seaman) writes:
>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.

This is all very well and good as it stands, but I think it misses the
cautionary point which was initially raised.  The  two advantages that written
communication has over verbal communication is that it is NOT REAL TIME and it
is basically RANDOM ACCESS.  In other words, I can take as much time as I want
with a piece of printed text and read it in any order which serves my attempts
to extract information from it.  Yes, I can record the spoken word;  but I
shall never have the flexibility of access I have with printed text.

Now I am not yet sure of this, but I would be willing to try to mount an
argument that written material is more conducive to thought than spoken
material.  When I am dealing with spoken text, I take it as in comes;
and then it goes.  My degree of retention is very much a function of
the skill of the speaker, enhanced by my own powers of attention.  If
the material is written and I miss something, I can always go back and
read it again.

I think the danger we must confront is that we may become too enamored of
communication which becomes more and more real-time.  This removes us from
situations in which we can ponder at our leisure, exercising those "little
grey cells" to find the message in the text.  We work with written material
in learning physics because learning physics is hard work;  we cannot simply
absorb it from the right kind of real-time presentation.  If communication
through speech-processing systems discourages our ability to work with printed
texts, then it may ultimately erode our ability to think for ourselves.

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USPS:	Stephen Smoliar
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