V-2nd and always: the animate and the machine now and in the future

[John Bailey]

I accidentally installed voice recognition software on my computer
recently. I thought it would transcribe spoken word into text, but
instead it meant that I could command my computer to do things (pretty
much anything) by speaking.

Except that it was completely capricious when it came to recognising
my commands. 90% of the time I'd say something and it would do
something different; when it did follow my orders it was a very
pleasant surprise.

In short, it turned my computer into a cat.

Which I thought very Pynchonesque. Technology becoming more potent (cf
the duck) mightn't mean becoming more useful as a tool but more
recalcitrant to our desires for it.

Then again, I think The Duck is a very different beast to the automata
of V. In one we have the machine as ever-more-transcendent, in the
other the machine is connected to the earth, death, the immanent.

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Page <page at quesnelbc.com> wrote:
>
> I say things to them that would get me arrested if I said them to a living
> human.
>
>
> From: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: V-2nd and always: the animate and the machine now and in the future
>
>
> many people now say Thank You when they are done using speech recognition
> technology...
>
> "To anyone who’s ever been stuck screaming at an electronic person on the
> telephone, this will sounds like a nightmare. But the New York Times says as
> computers become more adept at recognizing and understanding human speech,
> “our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to
> talk to machines that look at them and understand them.”
>
>
>
>
>
>
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