Gregory
------- Forwarded Message
Subject: DSP Colloquium
Sender: owner-gvu-fac@cc.gatech.edu
Precedence: bulk
This weeks colloquium is a special discussion regarding the future of
speech recognition and synthesis. Note the different time and place.
- ----------------------- DSP Colloquium -------------------------
CompSpeak 2050: How Talking Computers Will Recreate an Oral
Culture by the Mid--21st Century
By Professor William Crossman
Friday, May 31st
Room 102 MiRC
10:00 am
mail: colloquium@eedsp.gatech.edu
web: http://www.ee.gatech.edu/seminar/dsp
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract
In the 21st Century, VIVOs (voice-in/voice-out computers using visual
displays but no text) will make written language obsolete. Written
language is essentially a technology for storing and retrieving
information; VIVOs will perform this same function more easily and
efficiently without requiring people to learn to read and write.
There will be no compelling reason for schools to teach literacy
skills. By 2050, the electronically-developed nations will become
oral cultures; by 2150, a worldwide oral culture will be in place.
Today's push to develop VIVOs is a further step in the human
evolutionary drive to move past written language's limits and return
to the biogenetic, oral-aural, pre-alphabetic roots of human
communication and information storage. Young people's choosing TV,
telephone, stereo, and computer games over books, letter-writing,
etc.--and the corresponding decline in reading-writing scores over the
last 20 years--is not the result of mental laziness or poor schools
but is an irreversible symptom of this deeper evolutionary process.
VIVOs will transform every area of human activity in the 21st Century,
including education, the arts, human relations, politics, and
business. Billions of nonliterate people, using VIVOs, will finally
be able to access the world's stored information--if they can gain
access to VIVOs. Access to VIVO technology looms as a key human
rights issue of the 21st Century.
------- End of Forwarded Message