The Biggest Ideas Ever
I wrote a short essay called The Biggest Ideas Ever about the most important inventions and innovations in history. It’s an easy subject, perfect for a late night ramble. It appears in the essays section.
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2 Responses to “The Biggest Ideas Ever”
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I like this kind of talk!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how important spoken language and communication is to culture.
Somewhere (on TV or the internet) I saw a video of some kids who had been, for their whole lives, cordoned off from society by some heinous parent or other guardian.
They obviously failed to learn any spoken language and most of the expressive elements that go along with continuous communications during early development.
The most startling outcome, to me at least, is that the kids seemed, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, like animals or like they had problems mentally.
But, physiologically, they were perfectly healthy.
So, what I took away from that was that language and communications is really just technological skill and if you don’t acquire the skill, you seem as though your not even human.
SO… this really has me thinking about the future.
I believe we are already seeing lack of skill using computer/internet communications likened to illiteracy… maybe computer technology will not just assist our communications but, in fact, replace it or actually simply become it.
Maybe, in the future, simply speaking directly to another individual without some form of hardware/software/network assistance may seem like screaming “ungowa! ungowa!” while pointing to at some object seems today.
SoldAtTheTop,
Ungowa! Ungowa!
Uhh, what I mean is you may be right. I once read a story where the people of the future could project a little hologram over their shoulder when they talked, and the hologram, which was usually just a colorful scribble, conveyed more than the words. Probably the first holograms looked like :-D
I think pretty soon we’ll start to see phones that you implant. Maybe you’ll just mumble low into them and the sound will be corrected. Or maybe the phones will have a tapping/clicking tooth-and-tongue interface, or maybe they’ll read your eye position and facial muscles, or maybe they’ll listen to your brain waves. With practice it’ll be like telepathy, and if you never turn the phone off you will always be connected to your cloud of buddies.
Of course at that point resistance is futile.
This will be driven by military applications (battlefield awareness) and maybe devices for the blind/deaf, and then it will move into phones, computer interfaces, and probably automobile interfaces.
And I’ll probably be too old to ever get the hang of it.