5 Predictions for 2012 513
Structured Audio writes "Mike Langberg of the Merc put up his 5
technology predictions for 2012. Well
chosen, although of course in 2012 speech
recognition will still be 10 years away :-)."
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.
Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Presence (Score:5, Insightful)
Family, friends and co-workers will be able to instantly see where you are,
I think this will come much sooner and, by 2012, will be gone again once everyone realises how bloody awful it is.
Speech Recognition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a direct broadcast satellite in '92, so did over a million people in the UK. Predicting the launch in the US is hardly that impressive.
This years predictions include the Tivo like PVR becomming ubiquitous...
Speech Recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
Hooray for RFID! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll say, just stick your in a conductive bag and they'll never know.
erhaps Frits Hollings will introduce the CRFIDTPA which will illegalize bags and pouches made from electrically conductive material.
TV commercials (Score:5, Insightful)
I would guess it is also possible for networks to start doing what they do during soccer games when they can't take breaks -- scroll the add on top of the programming. You could be watching Friends, with a little "Pampers" ad on the bottom. This would allow for even more commercial time, and they could sell the time to sync to various moments in a program. (e.g Rachel is playing with the baby, roll the Pampers ad. They are in the coffeehouse, roll the Starbucks ad)
Another thing that can happen is a'la sports programming. At various times during the program, the picture would shrink, making enough space for an ad to be displayed alongside. Some people will put up with this if it means free, and you can't skip the commercials.
See, aren't ya'll glad I'm not a network exec.
If it goes away, good riddance. They have to be careful with subscription fees.. commercial TV is mostly crap, so it is hard to price it correctly. All my local stations together would probably be worth about $7/mo to me if they were to be commercial free. Can they make money with that?
Not quite spot on (Score:5, Insightful)
This will take at least 15 years. People don't buy new washing machines all that often.
All present and accounted for -- always.
This will be in mobile phones within 5 years.
Walk now, pay later.
Probably unfeasible as described. More likely you will authorize payment for the item before putting it in the bag. The receiver at the entryway will only check that you don't leave with any unpaid items. 10 years is about right, I wager.
Prime time is your time
Not very adventurous there. 5 more years.
Finally, we can talk to our computers
People curse them every day, so this is already reality.
I doubt true voice control will be there in 10 years either, unless there is a major break through in AI technology. Before that, we will be limited to simple voice keyed activation.
Re:Speech Recognition (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about these predictions... (Score:5, Insightful)
That would mean that internet connectivity has to be wireless and cheap. It would also require people to WANT their appliances connected to the internet. I'm sorry but my washing machine works really well right now on it's own without it bugging me to take it in or yelling adds at me. If that's why these machines want to connect (to rip me off, advertise to me, tell me i should take it into the dealer and pay more money) then I'm gonna be ready with a nice jamming signal for them.
2. The IM prediction and online presence.
Maybe it will be like somewhat as he says. But I sure as hell am not going to have a damn gps signal telling everyone who wants to talk to me exactly where I am. And I'm not gonna be available all the time either. My settings are gonna default to "leave me a god damn email msg and I'll get back to you when I can". Not 'here's my exact location, what I'm doing and 5 ways to page me right now'. :)
3. Walking out of shops and the rfid tag nonsense.
Riiight. A store with no clerks. Talk about easy to shoplift if you have your own programmable rfids. or just walk out next to someone else and charge your stuff to their card.
4. Tivo in every home, no restrictions.
Let's see if the mpaa + networks will just roll over for that one. My guess is it will be a crippled tivo ripoff with all sorts of DRM and palladium inside if that happens. Anything else will be illegal.
5. Speech recognition.
Don't know about this one. Everyone and their mother has thought this was right around the corner for the past 20 years.
Here's my prediction:
Corporate America will finally dispense with the play acting and be in direct control of the country. Instead of having senators from each constituency, we will have senator Disney, senator Microsoft, senator Tobacco industry, senator chemical industry. And the president will be the CEO of the country.
Re:Presence (Score:5, Insightful)
My boss offered to give me a cell phone (me being the resident "computer guy"). After watching the head of maitenance for half a day with his cell phone (everyone calling with every problem ever 5 minutes) I said no thanks. Then again I'm biased because I don't like cell phones in the first place. It seems more and more like people are never "alone". I don't want phone calls when I'm driving (when I blast music so loud I doubt I'd hear it ring anyway), I don't want calls when I'm on a walk, I don't want calls when I'm eating, or out doing something. I could turn off the ringer, but then again I'd just never have it on at all if that were the case. Most of the time I'd just like my time to MYSELF.
Not with MPEG-4 or equivalent... (Score:4, Insightful)
Washing machine, quit making long distance calls! (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds kind of silly. Would be kind of like the grocery store calling me up and telling me I was low on milk. Yes... it would be great to know that my washing machine is using too much hot water... but the washing machine should tell me, and not Sears.
2012 - endpoint of Viridian design movement (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a bit surprised that some more thought wasn't given to how different our energy consumption patterns and transportation modes will be by then.
Social consequences (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise when checking out in the store, you will need to explicitly authorize the purchase, otherwise you could contest it later. You will be presented with an itemized receipt based on a scan of your items, and you're supposed to look it over quickly and make sure there's nothing on there that you didn't buy. Then you do something to initiate the payment. You can't let people take money out of your account without giving approval! There has to be some action you take to explicitly authorize a certain amount to be transfered.
With the "presence", again you will have much more control over it than he implies. You will be able to say who can find out how you are reachable. You can have filters that automatically email you when your voice mail comes in, etc., so that people with different levels of access don't necessarily know how much priority they're getting. That way you don't offend people.
As far as ubiquitous TiVo, it depends on the outcome (both legislative and technical) of the copyright wars. You may be able to record the shows only under the control of strict DRM software that won't FF through the commercials (like the way DVD players won't FF through the FBI warnings now).
One additional social/technical prediction I'd make is more use of webcams for business meetings, creating the virtual office. Assuming that terrorism scares keep happening, people will prefer not to travel so much, and employees will want to stay home and not come into the dangerously concentrated population areas downtown. We'll see a continued trend towards white collar workers using live video feeds to communicate with their co-workers both locally and around the world.
Orgasms aren't 'the most pleasurable thing ever' (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not many electric objects will be connected. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, but you forget the WiFi. The device I'm writing this comment on has no material connection to anything.
You already know.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Here's my predictions for 2012: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Presence (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh... then that makes it alright.
Screw that. That is much too Orwellian for me.
Will the point come where if you don't have a cell phone people will assume you have something to hide?
What if I am carrying your cell phone, does that leave me open to arrest?
Screw all that. I am just gonna turn off all the lights, lock my front door and curl up in a little ball in a corner of my apartment until 2012. I'll poke my head out the front door and if I see my shadow back I will go.
Re:Speech Recognition (Score:3, Insightful)
Speech recognition will be used in combination with a couple of buttons, because it will never get better than 87% accuracy on novel requests, so you'll press a button to start, speak, listen to what it now intends to do, and press a button to have it do it. 5% of the time, you'll just dial the phone yourself.
Slightly different view... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone doesn't have a cellphone..... yet, but it seems to be getting that way quickly. You can't walk down an asile in the supermarket without seeing someone talking on the phone, usually about some useless, pointless conversation that is only occupying what free brain cells they have left, and leaving very little, if any, available for any other purpose, like not blocking the asile, or applying the brakes in an orderly fashion. More and more places are banning active cellphone use, mostly to appeal to the customers that find others yelling into the cellphone during a movie to be somewhat disruptive. And those of us who value our privacy will venture away from the option to be located anywhere at any time. The feature might exist, but very few people will probably use it, unless its necessary.
RFID tags are great, and it makes sense to simply walk out the door and have your credit card deducted for the right amount as you do. And if you accidently walk out with something you're not supposed to, it will let you know. If it was a simple accident, you have the option to walk back in. If it wasn't, you can still run..
Cable already SHOULD be advertising free. You're paying a monthly fee for the shows, you should get them without advertising. And if not for the advertising, they shouldn't care when, or how many times you watch something. As long as you keep dishing out the monthly fee, and you will, it should make little, if any difference. Its the dependance on advertising that's biting the cable networks in the ass, hence their bitter complaints about Tivo and the like. Rid themselves of the advertising beast, embrace the PVR, restructure their budget, and life will be good.
As for voice recognition, we got that today. Of course, there's an AI element that's lacking, but if the driver is willing to stick to a standard convention for command structure, most of what the author is predicting in 10 years could be done today with little difficulty. The simple fact of the matter is, 99% of the time, I know where the nearest gas station is. Only travellers need this information, and most intellegent travellers will fill up at the most convienent opportunity (i.e., not when they have 10 miles worth of gas left) Better for the car to simply inform me as I'm passing a gas station, knowing my destination and most likely route, that the gas station I'm passing is the least expensive one I will pass before running out of gas and therefore I should stop now to fill up. Screw asking the car about it.
-Restil
Re:its gonna suck to be stupid 10 years from now (Score:3, Insightful)
In contrast, Stupid People in the middle ages were illiterate and relied on a lot of superstition.
So future stupid people will probably be just fine with new technology. The problems will come when todays stupid people can't handle new tech, much like many seniors today and computers.
Future geeks will probably be just as aggrivated with these new advanced stupid people.
Re:Presence (Score:3, Insightful)
Wired--when you wanna be (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm waiting for Americans to decide which technologies give them more or better personal time, and which technologies invade and destroy it.
Cellphones can be a blessing. They can also be a way for our employers to extend office hours through dinner and bedtime.
Instant messaging has become a burden to me. Being available all the time for any priority of message is like moving your office desk or living room couch to the mall.
I want nothing to do with people-tracking technology. The folks I care to know where I am during my day do. I don't want strangers, the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, or the Bush Administration tracking my movements as if I'm some sort of migratory animal, thank you.
Let's make toolks for the workers, rather than turning the workers into tools.
Re:Presence exists... big brother is stalking you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave your phone at home?
Re:Speech Recognition (Score:1, Insightful)
Having a system that merely sucks up speech sound and produces statistical possibilities for word matches is easy. In fact, I'd say trivial. But that's NOT speech recognition, and it's unfortunately what you get when you divorce the technical aspect of decoding and the amorphous business of assigning 'meaning'.
Re:Speech Recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
That one's easy. They do it the same way that you do, they have a time delay loop where things that haven't been processed are buffered, and they don't start forwarding the message until enough has been parsed to identify the recipient. They may also compress whitespace during catchup so that it doesn't even add any delay into the process. (Whitespace compression during speech can usually recover over 25% of the used time, so catchup would be trivial on any except the shortest messages [where it wouldn't matter anyway].)
Crashes ahead... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, let's say:
I live 70 years
I watch 5 movies per week (2 hours each)
one hour of high-definition movie is about 2 GB Then, in my entire life, I will consume something like 70 TB of data. Of course, maybe there will be 3D-surround immersion imaging devices... But eventually, we will be able to store locally all the information we can consume and produce. Storing more will be useless. Eventually, we will reach a point where more and better technology will be useless.
:-)
This reminds me something I read a long time ago: Knowledge Crash. Science progresses. It takes more and more time to reach the bleeding edge of science and improve on it. In the beginning of the century, you could write Nobel-prize class papers at 20. Now, you need to be a little bit older. Eventually, to improve on science, you will need a life-long study. And we will reach a point where human life will not be long enough to improve on humanity's knowledge. I know, teaching techniques improves over time, but even then, there will be a limit. The only way out will be a longer human life... or a limitless human life. But until Kurzweil's dream [kurzweilai.net] (read this [amazon.com] too) become a reality, both technology and knowledge crashes are part of our future - and more technology will not be usefull anymore...
I wonder what kind of society we will live in then... and what being human will mean.
Re:Speech Recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
Proper speech recognition has been proven to be AI-complete [ic.ac.uk], similar to "The Vision Problem" (building a system that can see as well as a human), and many others. Perhaps not proven as rigorously as mathematical theorems but all data is pointing this way.
Therefore, correctly solving the speech recognition problem is equivalent to solving the Turing test. So if anybody predicts good speech recognition in some near future, it is usually a sign of uninformedness and that person probably shouldn't be taken seriously.
Why it won't happen. (Score:3, Insightful)
Won't happen. "Home control" systems have been marketed for 20 years, and have never caught on. The system administration takes more time than the thing saves. How many people even use the time clocks on ovens?
All present and accounted for -- always.
Truckers have had this for years. You can buy it for your car now. It will be a work-related thing, not a generally used feature.
Walk now, pay later.
Probably not, but things will go faster at checkout.
Prime time is your time.
Not if the MPAA can stop it.
Finally, we can talk to our computers
No way. We have speech recognition now. What we don't have are systems that comprehend natural language. We're no closer to that than we were ten years ago. If you like speech recognition, call TellMe at 800-555-TELL, which offers news, sports, driving directions, phone information, and movie tickets. Try to buy movie tickets in less than five minutes of talking.
F*ck no I wouldn't trade (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't have to answer the phone! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a hint: just because the phone rings does not mean you have to answer it. In fact if there is someone physically in your presense it is IMPOLITE to answer the phone unless you are expecting an emergency. (Your wife could go into labor at anytime, your parent is going in for heart surgery, your kid is late in bad weather. There are others, but those are the big ones)
If I'm in your cube and you answer the phone I will talk to your boss about that, unless you are in customer service they can get voicemail and you will call back.
Many people are surprized that I, a strong introvert like my cell phone. They don't realise that I'm not a slave to the phone, the phone is my slave. If I'm sitting between two beatiful girls and it rings, I hit cancle without even looking at it. (As a geek I've so far had one such opportunity, I might have blown it, but it wasn't by answering the phone) Manytimes when I could answer it I will just look at callerid and send the caller to voicemail.
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Insightful)
It would be much more reasonable, to simply have a digital camera, and to turn the light on with the door closed so it could feed you a snapshot of what's in the fridge. Not only could this be used at the store, but maybe, just maybe you could convince your kids to not stand in front of the fridge with the door open trying to decide if you have any food/drinks they like in there for half an hour. Nah, the latter is a pipedream, but seriously, a picture is worth 1000 barcodes
why try to build a computer smart enough to tell if you've got a carton of milk in the fridge when a simple glance at a snapshot and any normal human can instantly recognize if that jug on the top shelf is a milk or an orange juice bottle, and if they're at least semi-clear about how much is left, even without needing a barcode to be properly lined up, or a weight measurment device to try to figure out if it's almost empty.
Yes, for vending machines it's a wonderful thing to incorperate sensors, since the product is carefully controlled already. For a home fridge people aren't going to be predictable enough for any system to be perfect, even a snapshot won't do much good if you can only see part of what's in the fridge.
BTW I found thje fact that this guy is predicting UPNP to take off extremely amusing, he even describes it's mode of operation as implemented in windows... you aren't even supposed to know that microsoft has the ability to control/communicate with UPNP devices on the LAN. So that is your fridge for whatever reason had a wireless LAN access, and was running upnp and some non-windows OS windows could force the fridge to 'crash' until you upgrade it with a Certified Windows Fridge, which would still crash, but only because of bugs, and not because of denial of refridgeration attacks.
Re:Wired--when you wanna be (Score:3, Insightful)
Specialize! (was Re:Crashes ahead...) (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily... Back at the turn of the century, there were 'doctors', and 'surgeons'. Now, there are hand surgeons, internists, gynacologists, eye/ear/nose guys, etc. Likewise, there used to be 'physicists', and shortly afterward there were 'theoretical physicists'... now there are high energy physicists, quantum physicists, particle physicists, etc.
Take any profession... expand it, through more knowledge and technology... you get to the point where you can have people specialize in barely-overlapping fields within the same industry - computer programmers vs. computer engineers vs. network engineers vs. helpdesk trolls, etc. Can your average programmer design a chip? Can your average chip designer program a GUI?
To view it another way, the age of the Renaissance man is well over... instead, we get the age of the specialized man, with more expertise in a chosen profession than any renasissance man could hope for.
-T
Re:You don't have to answer the phone! (Score:2, Insightful)
So, you're basically saying you're a colossal prick at work? Because, frankly, my boss (and probably any boss that you've ever told about someone answering their fucking phone) doesn't give a shit that you were miffed at my answering the phone. Sure, I'm going to look at the caller ID quickly to make sure I need to answer, but quite frankly, unless you're the owner of the company, I guarantee you that there are people way more important than you who require my attention at times.
I mean, christ, acting like you claim to act where I work would get you fired for being a pain in the ass who feels that nothing is more important than paying attention to you. Management has better things to do than listen to you complain that someone did their job by answering a call from a co-worker who needed to contact them for business reasons. Who the fuck do you think you are? I can just imagine it. "Answer that phone and I'll report you to the boss! And then I'll go cry to mommy that you didn't pay attention to me!! Waaaaaaa! Waaaaaaaaaa!".
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just amazing the things that open doors in our minds. The little door in my mind that was opened led to a HUGE GAPING VALLEY waiting to be filled with a new area of knowledge/information.
I can't believe how much I've learned in just under 2 hours also. I now know not only who Terrance McKenna was, but where he grew up, where he went to for school (Graduated HS in Los Altos and studied under a newer self-directed and eclectic reading type of degree program at UC Berkeley), where he traveled to, why, and where and how he past away.
If any of you do not know who this man was, PLEASE, I beg of you to at least read for 20 minutes about the guy. Some great (AND PROVOCATIVE) ideas! I sure wish I knew some intellectual/techie/cool people near where I live to discuss such matters with! I'm sure I have A LOT to learn.
And BTW... I'm CONVINCED I NEED to try 'shrooms at some point in my life... if even just one time. Sheet... I've never done ANY type of substance!
To whomever that previous "ANONYMOUS COWARD" was, I'd like to thank you for giving me insight into an area I never thought I'd even care about! You can reach me@ armyturtle1@yahoo.com
Re:Presence (Score:4, Insightful)
1) You don't have to answer it. (I suppose it's different if it's paid for by the boss, and you're on the clock.) By restricting circulation of the number, I almost always only receive calls that I want to get, anyway. Aside: Please, set it to vibrate so as not to annoy those around you with your cute ring tones.
2) It's handy if you want to place an outgoing call. Late because you're stuck in traffic? Flat tire? Want to invite someone to meet you down at the pub? Going on a road trip with a group split between two cars? A cellular phone is a godsend if someone gets lost. Last night I was with a group of people helping a friend move. Her landline wasn't hooked up at the new location--a cell makes it so convenient to get pizza.
A cellular phone should be a helpful accessory. If it's an annoyance, then it is the fault of its owner, not the phone.