It was 1983. I was the proud owner of a brand new Commodore 64. It wasnt a game machine (I think I bought one game the entire time I owned it), it was a programming machine. I wrote a ton of software for that machine. Who needed games? Programming is fun! I tried to explain this to my mom. I tried showing what programming was about. I tried showing some of my handiwork: an animated logo with music and sound. I tried showing her some simple programs. And she asked (loosely paraphrased 30 years later), Why is this so complicated? Why cant I just talk to it? And that day, I cursed George Lucas. (Not for the last time!) I cursed him, and Gene Roddenberry, and anyone in Hollywood who had ever made computers look easy -- ESPECIALLY voice control. They had given end users an unrealistic expectation of what we could do with computers. Here I was performing cutting edge technological miracles, and no one could appreciate them, because Hollywood had set their expectations so high. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 32 years later, give or take. My Amazon Echo has arrived. I showed it to my mom, and it worked smoothly. I ran through all sorts of examples: playing her canarys favorite CD, running a cooking timer, looking up information, getting the weather where Cory is out in North Dakota... And soon I had exhausted the Wow! potential. I know theyll keep adding features, but its just a tool. Its just there. It just works. But in the back of my mind, I keep reminding myself: its that freaking voice-controlled computer that she expected back in 1983! It looks up facts from the largest encyclopedia in the world! It knows the weather from every city in the country! It keeps track of tasks for me! It plays my music, pulling it from some computer in some server farm somewhere in the world! And it cost less than I spend on gas in two weeks! We are living in the future, and WE DONT EVEN NOTICE! One feature Amazon plans to add in the near future is the ability to name your Echo so it responds to that name. When they do, Im going to name mine R2 as a reminder of just how far the technology has come.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 03:29:23 +0000
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