"ABC company predicts XY in Z years"
I love a nice science fiction news story :D
IBM has released its annual predictions for the next five years of technology, including phones that sniff you for germs and actual fondling through fondleslabs. Big Blue reckons that the future holds tiny sensors embedded in computers or mobes that will "smell" if you're coming down with a cold. The sensors will be tuned into …
I heard tell once (sorry, no actual reference, but it's plausible) of a psychologist who wanted to analyse their baby's speech development so recorded it 24/7 for months. Obviously you can't listen to all that so got a software engineer to write something to look for similar patterns in the babble sounds and how those sounds evolved.
The interesting result was that the software found the similarities stretching much further back than it becomes at all obvious to human ears that the baby is trying to make some kind of word sound.
Babies' speech inability are partly due to them not having a properly developed mouth/windpipe aimed at talking (but it allows them to e.g. breathe whilst drinking) so they physically can't make the same noises we do. I know from experience that teaching a baby to sign (Makaton or Signalong or a mix of both!) means they can communicate by signing words long before they are actually able to say them. What worries me is that babies will start talking to each other and plotting ;)
The other thing we ought to be able to do is work out what whales are saying when they're not underwater (presumably "put me back in the bloody water").
"Baby: sih, gug gug bubububub // Siri: opening the playpen door"
Surely the baby is the one asking it to open the playpen doors, and Siri's the one saying "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"? (^_^)
Actually, given Apple's stereotypical control freakery over their hardware, that would be quite an appropriate response. ;-)
"IBM believes that baby talk could be interpreted as a language, telling parents what junior is trying to say."
This suggests a variant of the well-known joke, where a couple have a child that speaks in nothing but baby talk, even long after he's started school. They take him to doctors, child psychologists... nothing works.
One day, out of nowhere, the child pipes up "Mother, this soup is cold". The shocked mother says tearfully, "You never spoke properly before!", to which the child replies "The baby-speak translator was never broken before"
Of course, in reality, the child would never have learned to speak, and it'd be a frustrated 7-year-old trying to express himself by saying "ga ga goo goo". :-)
"By being taught what baby sounds mean – whether fussing indicates a baby is hungry, hot, tired or in pain – a sophisticated speech recognition system would correlate sounds and babbles with other sensory or physiological information such as heart rate, pulse and temperature," Big Blue said.
Hmm, this kind of prediction makes me wonder if technology will take the parent out of parenting.. I can just imagine some future yuppie suing an App or gizmo manufacturer because the device mistook their baby's colic cry for for teething pains...
Drop yer linens and start yer grinnin, because ...
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/12/17/company-developing-fully-immersive-virtual-reality-sex-game/
"Finally Here"? Hmmm,
Once, a few months ago in a Best Buy, i joked that Microsoft could fund immersive sex gaming and rebrand it so it would not taint the brand of the XBox. Otherwise, XBox would become known very quicky as SexBox, or ScexxBocc, etc., as it takes hold
Imagine the new adult babbling sounds on buses and in other places if there is no longer a modicum of decency...
Now, if Wii, XBox, IBM's thing, and thise immersive app all join forces it might usher in a new era of global stability. Not available in all areas.... Availability subject to local government approval. Satisfaction not guaranteed. Past performance not an indicator of future success. Investmwisely, use carefully. Not to be used by those on medications or treatments for... Well, standard disclaimers might take more time than the basic advert.
As well as coming up with strange new food combinations, the eating computer will also be able to make healthy foods taste better.
The Nutri-matic machine made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well.
However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Thanks Douglas...
Just wait until every pharmacy you walk past has biosensors that diagnose every little sniffle (or droop!) and instantly announce to the world: "You're coming down with .... why not pop in for 10% off some Viagra and a couple of lollipop sticks".
Even worse is when these sensors become more sensitive than our, natural, senses: the machines will know more about us than we can tell, ourselves. Not only will drug testing be ubiquitous, it'll be carried out passively and remotely without your knowledge or consent - by people you didn't even know existed.
It'd be useful if you could provide links back to previous years predictions from IBM. Will we be laughing about predictions of flying cars? Perhaps some of their old predictions actually came true?
Personally I always feel conned by this nonsense. I've been tranished forever by the PR bullsh** from Segway before it was revealed, I thought we were talking jet packs or something exciting...
Yes, if only there were some way to find previous years' "5 in 5" predictions...
As I type, www.ibm.com has this year's 5-in-5 occupying most of the real estate, and if you follow that link, there's a "tab" right at the top for previous 5-in-5s.
Here's a direct link:
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibm_predictions_for_future/examples/index.html
Really, in the time it takes to post a request for the link, you can find it.
They've only been doing the 5-in-5 since 2006, so technically only the first two years' predictions are "due". And (as I think I mentioned in a comment to last year's Reg article on the subject) they're so vague that they're basically useless anyway. But here we go:
2006:
+ We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world
No, not really. There are successful "telemedicine" projects, but it's hardly universal. And whether that constitutes "access[ing] (ugh) healthcare remotely" is debatable.
+ Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm
Hardly "the norm".
+ There will be a 3-D Internet
Wait, what? Does this mean the network will be a non-planar graph? No, apparently they mean "3D content" in some extremely general sense will be available online. Woo and/or hoo.
+ Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance
This mysterious phrase apparently applies to, um, chemicals that can be used in recycling. My guess is that it was originally written to imply some kind of nifty nanotech utopia, without of course specifying anything very interesting.
+ Our mobile phones will start to read our minds
Not while I'm wearing my foil beanie, thanks. Actually, what they apparently meant by this was all sorts of intrusive spying misfeatures like "location awareness".
2007:
+ It will be easy to be green and save money doing it
Everyone knows it's not easy being green. (And hey, who remembers when "green" meant "callow, untested, immature"? Or does it still mean that?) Oh, and here's a shocker for you supergenius futurologists: it has long been pretty straightforward to save money and reduce resource consumption by not consuming so many resources.
+ The way you drive will be completely different
Yeah, thanks to that court order.
+ You are what you eat, so you should know what you're eating
How is this a prediction?
+ Your cell phone will be your wallet, ticket broker, concierge, bank, shopping buddy and more
Screw you, gadget freaks. Look, my phone is already a typewriter and a record player and all sorts of crazy things. I do not want it to be any of the above.
+ Doctors will have enhanced super-senses to better diagnose and treat you
And surgeons will have frickin' lasers on their heads for hands-free slicing and dicing!
Well, they *had* invented it in the original version of the future. Unfortunately, all Michael J Fox's convoluted jumping around and altering the time streams mean that this no longer gets invented in our dicked-about-with future.
Instead of this, Apple will launch a new giant protective "sock" for the iPad 6 and sell it for £40. I'm sure you'll agree that this was a fair trade-off.
Okay, okay. I know I'm being silly. Apple would never do anything that ludicrous...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-iPod-Socks-different-colours/dp/B0006JMX14
(^_^)
A nice article. Really gentle reading to keep the brand "IBM" in the news. But hardly anything of significance other than the admittance that, after selling its PC division to Lenovo in 2005 and the rampant rise of hand held devices and mobile services right after that, some opportunities were lost.
If we are talking innovation, then we don't talk about fridge-knows-you-are-low-on-milk or tablet-can-smell stories.
Let's talk about "High speed train starts in Paris reaches Tokyo in 30 hours", "TCP/IP to be replaced with faster transmission protocol - DNS had its day", "Mobile Phones use GPS, Glonass and Galileo in parallel", "OLED light bulbs make LED redundant","tape drives to be replaced with PCM memory"