How can the written word — literary culture — survive the advent of the talking, all-knowing, handheld PC? How does one preserve a culture built on a 6,000-year-old technology in the face of super-computation? According to many of the researchers who are designing the 21st century’s AI systems, the answer is, you don’t. You submit to the inexorable march of progress and celebrate the demise of the written word as an important step forward in human evolution.
- - Could Written Language Be Rendered Obsolete, and What Should We Demand In Return? by Patrick Tucker, January 29th, 2010.
Originally published in The Futurist magazine.
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