Now-Then
Speech-synthesis and recognition are likely to improve to a point where a machine can actually produce natural-sounding utterances and understand colloquial language.
Speech-synthesis and recognition are likely to improve to a point where a machine can actually produce natural-sounding utterances and understand colloquial language.
Paid advertising will save the Internet in two ways: First, advertising will make the Internet sustainably inexpensive, like today’s newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio – a prospect that should excite universal-access advocates. Second, advertising will provide practical incentives for attracting the attention of Internet citizens to the information they need. The fact is, the Internet is now large and rapidly outgrowing its quaint netiquette. The Internet is running up against new limits – not on computing power, not on bandwidth, but on the attention span of its citizens.
I suspect computers will deviously chew away at libraries from the inside. They’ll eat up book budgets and require librarians that are more comfortable with computers than with children and scholars. Libraries will become adept at supplying the public with fast, low-quality information. The result won’t be a library without books – it’ll be a library without value.
You should no longer expect to find a collection tailored to the needs of your area. Instead, computers turn every library into a piece of a giant puzzle.
Many channels will target specific market segments. Video and movie on-demand technology promises to house libraries containing thousands of digital programs that viewers can watch any time. Over the next few years, tests in selected communities will give consumers, programmers, and system operators an opportunity to decide what works – and what doesn’t.
Turns out, “The Reader’s Guide” is available online. But I have to pay for access – for some reason, the concept that all information should be free hasn’t yet reached them. Hasn’t reached the Telebase system either … Public libraries will go under if they offer this service.
Meet friends in cyberspace; click a button to view any movie or program; browse through files of art, literature, and music; and play interactive games. These are the recreational choices that will be on the Information Superhighway.
Libraries have a nifty system for storing books … The Internet, however, has no such organization – files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools.
Speech-recognition technology that today allows simple commands to be understood will, within a decade, allow us to talk to personal computers, bank machines, and automobiles.
Most law libraries still subscribe to paper journals, if for no other reason than to give a backdrop of bookshelves for photographs of attorneys. But as libraries replace books with cathode-ray tubes, those paper archives will disappear.