Technology Futures

Almost everything written about the iPad to date has been speculative and overwrought because most of the writers had little or no time actually using the iPad. Depending on what you read, you might come away believing the iPad was the worst device in the history of handhelds (...NO USB PORT MAKES IT USELESS!!) or the most important new device since the mainframe. Here is a thoughtful review that compares the iPad to the Kindle for reading books. My take: Kindle still has a bit of an edge, but as the software book readers for the iPad improve, the Kindle is toast.

There has been a long running debate about artificial intelligence, with a large contingent of computer scientists always proclaiming that computers "smarter than humans" is only five years away. And there has been a small but persistent group of computer scientists who have insisted computers will never be "smarter than humans."

Here is an interesting read on speech recognition and why it has never caught on. The "computers will be smarter than humans" crowd will scoff at this and insist that speech recognition has little to do with artificial intelligence, but if you can't write a program to recognize speech, how are you going to write a program to make a computer "smarter" than a human? Our ability to hear and cognitively process the spoken work is absolutely staggering, and after thirty plus years of attempts to duplicate it, speech recognition is still lousy. Spend just a few minutes on the phone with one of those voice mail speech recognition systems (...say Customer service.... "Cus-tom-er ser-vice"...I'm sorry, I did not understand, say Customer service..."Cuuuusssttttommmer Seerrrrvvviccce"....I'm sorry, I did not understand, returning to Main Menu...) knows that speech recognition stinks.

Update (10/2011)
Apple's Siri voice recognition app on the iPhone 4S shatters whatever any of us previously thought about voice recognition. Siri does an incredible job of taking dictation and processing routine smartphone requests.

Excerpt from Speech by FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn

SEATOA’s 9th Annual Conference

Asheville, NC – April 27, 2010

"...The theme of this conference “Expanding Community Networks,” is exactly what the National Broadband Plan is about – to ensure that broadband is made available to all Americans, no matter where they live..."

"...In addition to recommendations about improving providers’ access to infrastructure for building broadband, the Plan also acknowledges that in some jurisdictions, no provider is constructing a broadband network. Thus, the Plan recommends that Congress clarify that State and local governments should not be restricted from building their own broadband networks. I firmly believe that we need to leverage every resource at our disposal to deploy broadband to all Americans. If local officials have decided that a publicly-owned broadband network is the best way to meet their citizens’ needs, then my view is to help make that happen...."

"...last month I heard Lafayette, Louisiana’s City-Parish President describe the development of economic opportunities in his city, that were a direct result of the fiber network built by the community. Right here in North Carolina, I understand that Wilson and Salisbury are trying to invest in fiber optic systems, that they hope will transform their local economies..."

"...When cities and local governments are prohibited from investing directly in their own broadband networks, citizens may be denied the opportunity to connect with their nation and improve their lives. As a result, local economies likely will suffer. But broadband is not simply about dollars and cents, it is about the educational, health, and social welfare of our communities. Preventing governments from investing in broadband, is counter –productive, and may impede the nation from accomplishing the Plan’s goal of providing broadband access to every American and every community anchor institution..."

The City of Wilson, North Carolina has a city-owned fiber network called Greenlight that is offering 20 megabit symmetrical Internet access for $54.95 a month. I think this qualifies as the fastest and cheapest services in North Carolina. If you tried to buy that level of service via DSL or cable, you would pay several times that, if you could even get it.

But wait, there's more! They have symmetric service tiers all the way up to 100 megabits. Very few people would need that much, but as I have noted previously, Design Nine continues to talk to businesses who want their home-based workers to have symmetric connections of 20-50 megabits, primarily to support HD videoconferencing. So the City of Wilson has something very few other communities can offer in terms of business relocation--the ability to work from home or to run a business from home, with very affordable, high performance connections.