[ExI] google translator

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 2:36 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Kelly Anderson  wrote:
> I meant the social annoyance factor of having a roomful of people
> shouting at their handheld computers.

Social norms CAN change. I'm not sure they will, but when you can have
as meaningful a conversation with your digital personal assistant as
you can now have with a real assistant on a cell phone, then it could
change. Imagine, for example, that you talk to your digital personal
assistant over your cell phone. It looks no different than today's
cell phone calls... so I see this as a definite possibility.

> But I suppose more technology could remove that problem.

It can help. There is a business opportunity here because the PAIN of
listening to other people's phone calls all the time is an addressable
problem. Someone will make lots of money off of this pain.

> If everyone is wearing an earpiece (cable or bluetooth) and using a
> sub-vocal microphone taped to their neck then the public annoyance
> factor disappears.
> (There is also the thought controlled tech that is being developed in
> the labs for disabled people).

Some day. It's a ways off IMHO.

> Then we would have to face the problem (already appearing) of
> attention distraction where people step in front of cars or walk off
> railway platforms while their attention is off in the cloud. You
> already see people at parties sitting silently in a circle, all
> tapping away at their phones, tweeting about how great the party is to
> their 500 followers.  ;)

On the other hand, once autonomous cars are shuttling us around, the
driving while distracted problem goes away. One could hope that the
overall death rate would decrease.

-Kelly