🚀 go-pugleaf

[reposted from comp.society.futures]

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
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