Human
civilization has seen centuries of evolution and development as an increasingly
knowledge society, solely on the basis of oral and written communication. The
myriad languages of the human race have been the vehicles of division as well
as integration of societies. While oral communication has always been through a
complex interaction of the brain, tongue and the mouth, the written
communication has seen transformational changes as the human race and technologies
developed. In India, Vedas, slokas, epics and poems which were captured on the palm
leaves in the ancient root language Sanskrit (as well as in the other Indian
languages) are a compelling evidence of the human’s unceasing quest to develop,
race to develop, communicate and archive knowledge for the present and the
future.
While oral expression has been a natural
endowment, written expression has been a manmade competitive advantage. Writing
materials have played a very prominent role in the development of diverse cultures.
They have helped not only in preserving the history and culture of mankind, but
have also deeply influenced the scripts, languages as well as man's mode of
thinking. To understand ancient writing materials, therefore, is to understand
ancient cultures in a better light. Societies which preserved knowledge, like
the Western world, progressed while societies which were indifferent to
preservation, like India, lost several treasures of knowledge. India has seen
writing forms evolve over several
centuries using virtually every form of materials, from palm leaves to copper
plates and stone slabs to modern paper; but so much more of ancient wisdom, it
is felt, has not been captured at all. And, of whatever that has been written
down a lot has been lost in history too.
Shift and Change
Ever since
the advent of computer, the domains of writing, publishing and dissemination
have seen nothing short of a revolutionary transformation. From the initial
binary punching to later day language typing, computer has seen a step function
jump in processing power. From being a data processing machine, computer has
become the backbone of new age information technology. Development of various
computer languages to converse with the computer has customized computers to
multiple uses. Software capabilities and
hardware power evolved in tandem to be able to electronically capture, manage,
store, transmit and retrieve data, information and knowledge in standalone and
networked computers as well as global servers and grids. Whatever the
historical lapses in writing and preservation of information in the ancient
India, it is a just irony that India is now in the forefront of writing the
code for all the computer languages. There are, however, two facets to the
language and communication paradigm of the computers; the visible and the
invisible.
The visible language is user-friendly while the
invisible language is programmer-challenging. The greater the user friendliness
that is targeted, the greater is the programming challenge. With the growth of
the Internet and instant patching and updating the challenge of keeping the
invisible language current and contemporary has been increasing. The invisible language itself has two parts,
the programming language and the machine language. While major enhancements
have been happening on the programming language front, the machine language
remains binary. The relative exclusivity of popular operating systems (4 for
computers and 4 for smart phones) vis-à-vis the proliferation of devices (several
hundreds) indicates the complexities and challenges of developing an operating
system that is truly multi-functional and robust. Underlying the complexity is the need to write
millions and billions of coding lines to support such user functionalities.
Touch and Write
The first improvement to user friendliness came
with the incorporation of drop-down boxes and tool bars to guide the user and
let the user select from the available options. This development still had to
be accompanied by typing of options. The breakthrough, however, came through
Apple bringing touch-select as the next level of user experience. The touch
experience is intimately tied with the scrolling capability. Despite the
dominance of touch in smart phones, touch navigation could pose a challenge in
full fledged computing devices given the significantly additional number of
operations to be performed. While an Office suite would cater to the detailed
navigation, the fact would remain that touch would still be an immediate
experience rather than a type-along experience for the user. Microsoft has
recently launched Windows 8 as the ’touch and navigate’ platform applicable across
all the devices, from phones and tablets to laptops and desktops. Whether text
management can now be integrated with touch management is the next frontier for
Microsoft to explore and conquer.
For thousands of years, writing has been the
hallmark of human civilization. Writing brings out certain faculties of hand
and brain coordination, in terms of control and memory as opposed to typing
which, though bringing out a different type of hand and brain coordination,
admittedly mechanizes the writing faculty. After the initial failure of initial
handwriting recognition that was applied on the original Microsoft tablet
computer in the early 2000s, the importance of writing on the computers has
taken a distant second position. The more recent revival of pen stylus based
devices, more especially Samsung Galaxy Note devices, gives hope that
handwriting would reemerge and remain as the most intelligent and intellectual
form of providing inputs. This would require a new level of integration between
software and hardware technologies with superior capabilities for highly
variable handwriting between people. However, that certainly is the way to go
as the pen stylus brings the added advantage of free hand sketching, drawing
and annotations as well as track changes.
See and Speak
Recognition and cognitive technologies would
continue to be developed to the extent that look and talk would be the new
input channels. The focusing of eyes would soon determine which icon (in the
Apple language) or tile (in the Windows language) is desired to be opened by
the user. Eventually, even sub-instructions may be tracked and selected with
eye contact. The first evidence of the feasibility is already seen in certain
devices and software solutions, from recognition of start and stop commands
based on eyesight to adjustments to ambient conditions. In devices of the
future, there may not be a need to have a dedicated camera key; a mere blink
after focusing could snap the photo. Future cameras may detect the natural power
of eyes and accordingly adjust their own aperture and focusing settings.
Cognitive technologies have seen a boost with the
voice commands in the navigation systems and the more recent Apple Siri and
Galay S voice in the mobile devices. These, however, are limited by the
preprogramming potential. Open ended speech based input technologies have not so
far realized the potential such technologies could hold. Cognitive technologies
have speech recognition as the primary platform. The potential has not been realized mainly
because of the phonetic and pronunciation variations across people. Self-learning
programs are the answer. Future speech recognition software solutions would
reprogram themselves based on an initial cycle whereby a person inputs his or
her speaking patterns and profiles. Such technologies would also add an extra
layer of security to the computer system by uniquely recognizing the speaking
patterns.
Think and Imagine
Probably, the net giant leap would be when the
devices start recognizing the thought processes. As the mapping of brain,
deciphering of brain waves and decoding of fired up neurons gain traction,
potentially each thought may be identified
with a unique fingerprint. The thought rather than the person or the device could
be the unique factor that could be standard across any person-device
combination. This would require the devices to have powerful electromagnetic
sensors that can recognize unique thought waves that correspond to the commands
a person desires to give to the device. As with any new endeavor, the thought
recognition technologies may be introduced with simple commands and later extended
to the whole gamut of human thoughts.
The ultimate frontier could be to imagine the
human intents and desires from out of the myriad overt recognizable actions and
thoughts. This development would be quite the opposite of the previous
hypothesis of universally standardized thought wave technologies. The ability
to imagine would be achieved when a device is uniquely synchronized and intertwined
with the owner cum user of the device. The device would have an enormous storage
ability and analytical power to capture each and every unique thought, command
and action to develop a full portfolio of how the user would behave. As the experience
and expertise of the device grows, so would its ability to simulate its user’s
thinking and imagining for the user and outlining a whole range of options as
if the owner himself or herself would be imagining.
Design beyond Device
If the foregoing were to come true, and the
author of this blog post believes would come true sooner than later, the
devices would no longer me hand operated apparatuses anymore. They would be
vested with increasingly higher levels of human faculties. The advertisement by
Samsung for its latest mobile phone, Galaxy SIII, claims that it is “designed
for humans”. Based on the foregoing discussion, the advertisement for future
devices could well read as “designed as humans”, with each device being as
uniquely personalized and intelligent as each human being uniquely is .
Posted by Dr CB Rao on December 25, 2012
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