May
11
Mr. Roboto: Storyteller of the Future
May 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Our books are being read to us by machines that can’t pronounce the name of our President. I am imagining a future where all of today’s book knowledge will be passed on to future generations via robots – and how horribly this is going to effect the perception of our languages and our cultures. So far, robots are not capable of actual empathy or intonation and it seems to me that those things are an integral part of the reading experience, even when we are reading silently to ourselves? Think about it…
Even though the nerdly powers that be are incredibly quick with their technological advances, it remains a fact that computer simulated voices are still completely awful and artificial empathy is rather far off in the future.
Is this the first step to my imagined future or a wonderful book preservation effort?
By ALEXANDRA ALTER (The Wall Street Journal)
In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures. [The rest, here.]