Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Audeo

As a science fiction fan, one of the reasons I get deeply frustrated with people asking 'why do you care about that weird stuff?' is that the line between fiction and reality gets thinner each day.

Take the Audeo, for instance. According to this New Scientist article, and video, it's the first functioning piece of subliminal voice recognition hardware.

That is, if this tech isn't just vaporware, a computer can now scan your nerves, detect a signal for words you want to say without actually saying them, translate it into sound, and speak it for you.

It's not qualitatively a huge jump - we've had nerve-induction technology for decades, we've had voice recognition for almost as long, we've had voice-synthesis boxes for the disabled like Stephen Hawking's device, and they've been slowly getting better - and who knows what experimental stuff the US military has had access to - but seeing this happening in real-time in what could be a high-end consumer device... that's impressive, to me.

Of course, science fiction isn't about answering the question 'what will the future be like', because the future is made by human choice and we're too complicated to predict. What SF is good for is asking the question 'what do we WANT the future to be like?' Because often, until we can imagine that a technology like this MIGHT exist, and what its implications might suggest, we don't even understand how to go about deciding whether or not we like it.