Datapad 2015

Talking to mechanical objects – less embarrassing than you’d think. (Perhaps less than it should be, sometimes…)

I was reading an article in The Economists about Hewlett-Packard and Dell, the two big American PC manufacturers. And I thought: “There probably won’t be much left of them in 5 years.” Because the pads / tablets will likely take over around then.

There are two simultaneous trends that are lifting the tabs: Improved displays, and “cloud” storage. With data stored remotely (and in some cases processed remotely), the tablet becomes mainly an interface, an input / output unit for the invisible “real” computer.

This is pretty much how it is already, and this is fine if you just want to read or watch video or play music. But the third part is on its way to join: Speech recognition technology. Today I can speak to my desktop computer and it correctly guesses 90-95% of my words. For native English speakers, the rate is 98-99%, enough that you can fire off the average email with no mistakes, and certainly fewer mistakes than if you typed it.

In contrast, when I speak English to my Android phone, I might just as well speak Norwegian for all it cares. It seems to react randomly, when it reacts at all. Again, I presume this is different for native English speakers; certainly the cool demonstration on YouTube is very different from my experience. But my point is, once the tablet has the same level of speech recognition as my desktop computer has today, or better, we will no longer depend on our sausage fingers for input.

You may think it is awkward and embarrassing to speak to an inanimate object in public, but a large number of cell phone owners seem to disagree with you. In fact, some of them seem almost immune to embarrassment, but let’s skip that topic for today. I agree that you would probably not want to address your tablet on the subway and say “search Google for Russian bride pictures”, even if you were working on a thesis about the change in Russian wedding customs at the end of the Soviet era. On the other hand, if you are at the office you probably won’t have any problem with saying “open spreadsheet Johnson & Johnson 2015 April summary”.

OK, perhaps 2015 is a bit optimistic. After all, it took more than 4 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to reach its current near perfection on the PC, and it was at least good for entertainment when I first got it, even if it wasn’t actually useful if you had hands. But the listening (and hopefully obeying) datapad definitely be in the near future. If we have a future at all… Opinions on this seems to vary lately?

13 thoughts on “Datapad 2015

  1. I am not so sure it is the pineal gland, but if thinking so makes it easier for them to concentrate, why not.
    The “chill” as they call it is one of the things I began to use for pleasure, but decided to not actively seek it. For me it began as a gift, when I was in the Divine Presence and I felt tired or empty, when the Presence tanked me up with new energy I had those chills. And because it felt so good, I wanted to have them even when I did not need to. But I realized that this was a rude thing to do in my relationship to the Divine. That was just for me, of course, I won’t make a judgment on others. I have continued to experience it when I needed it, and others may benefit more from it than I.

  2. Well using the “Third Eye” is the quickest way for me to meditate.

    Adya spoke of the “spiritual addiction”. I might have already asked you this question. How do we balance the pleasure we get from meditation? How do I tell if I am over doing it?

  3. In the beginning I would not be too strict about spiritual addiction, unless it borders on craziness and becomes a burden to family or society. It is important to establish a spiritual practice in one’s life, and if you enjoy it, so much the better.

    Eventually it will come a time when you need to have a resolve to continue your spiritual life even when it does not feel good. Dry spells are pretty much inevitable, and sometimes negative feelings will also appear. By then you should have made spiritual practice as much part of your day as showering and brushing your teeth.

    In monastic traditions, there is usually a rhythm of different forms of spiritual exercise, some more intellectual and others more emotional, that the monks go through during the day. This can also work as a way to ensure that a person does not get stuck in “drugged out” bliss. You may want to let yourself inspire by such traditions if you make a major effort, but for the armchair meditator the important thing is to get started and establish a habit of turning inward.

  4. This conversation reminds me of the statue of St. Theresa in her ecstasy. It’s wonderful, but you can’t get a lot of day-to-day living done in that condition!

  5. I think we need both, Kristi. Not so much the ecstasy, although it remains popular, and I guess we need a break sometimes. But the serenity, the awareness, we really need that to spread through the cracks of time, the small breaks in our day, so we don’t lose ourselves. There are lots of these small cracks in time: Waiting for something to begin or end or be cooked or something. Even waiting for the computer screen to refresh if you have a slow system. If we don’t have practice in serenity from longer bouts of meditation, prayer or whatever, then pauses and micropauses just become stressful. When they begin to flow with that feeling of serenity from the practice, they become breathing room, a chance to recover, to step back for a moment and find again our freedom.

    So it is not really meant to be that impractical. It is something that can be really useful. These openings in time are something every person experiences, I think. Or could experience if they were aware of them as something other than an irritation.

  6. Well, in Canada perhaps, certainly in Norway. Not sure how well that would work in America, or Thailand. You’d get frightfully hungry after a while, I suppose.

  7. I think you can get away with sitting on a park bench in the US. Assuming you know how to cash in food stamps and find shelter and soup kitchens…

    Your friends and family would probably call a shrink though.

  8. I know we need both, I was just inserting that in there as something I found funny! Everyone going around totally enlightened, communing with God at that level all the time! It would be something to see, if you could manage to look around you for a moment to see it!

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