Talking Computers to Replace Reading and Writing by 2050?
Steve Shives
May 11, 2007
Recently I read an article titled “CompSpeak 2050: How Talking Computers Will Recreate an Oral Culture By Mid-21st Century.”[1] I recommend you take a look at it, because it really must be seen to be believed. The author, William Crossman, a self-described futurist, argues that within the next fifty years written language will be obsolete in the developed world, and in another hundred years, text will be entirely extinct. That struck me as an extraordinary prediction, but more extraordinary still was the thesis of the article: the death of written language is a good thing.
In the United States and other electronically-developed countries, we’re witnessing nothing less than the abandonment of reading and writing . . . and in its place, the recreation of oral culture,” Crossman writes. For this abandonment of writing Crossman neither blames nor credits technology; he argues instead that the cause is evolutionary. He describes written language as a “bridge,” constructed 10,000 years ago by our stone age ancestors and necessary to societal development until very recently, about to be replaced by VIVO computers—Voice In, Voice Out.
Spoken language is the most natural form of communication for humans, Crossman convincingly argues. Most written languages are, afterall, merely symbolic translations of the spoken language. People were speaking long before they were writing. Doesn’t a return to a predominantly oral culture, aided by technology, make a kind of sense?
No.
It makes no sense whatsoever. It offers no benefit to society, and is actually incredibly hazardous to the survival and continued evolution of civilization. The more times I read Crossman’s article, the more I thought about it in preparation for writing this one, the more insane, misguided and inescapably stupid it became.
One thing that makes the article so incredibly unconvincing is that Crossman manufactures statistics to support his argument, but never once cites a source. He claims 80% of all paper manufactured is used to display text. Fair enough, but he also claims 80% of humanity (by conservative estimates) are unable to “use written language effectively.” According to whom? Surely such a monumental survey, producing literacy statistics for every human being on the planet, deserves at least a footnote. But there are none. Elsewhere in the article, Crossman refers to the increasingly weak grasp elementary, middle and high school students have on reading and writing skills, and states that writing teachers are “discouraged and demoralized, and many have basically given up trying to teach it.” Says who? Crossman doesn’t even bother to offer a token perspective from an actual discouraged and demoralized writing teacher to support his statement; we’re just supposed to accept it as conventional wisdom.
The closest thing to a citation on my copy of the essay (which is 100% text printed on 8 sheets of paper) is the contact information for Crossman at the bottom, which identifies him as the founder and director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures. But I’m sure that’s an irrelevant detail.
It does go a long way toward explaining his fetishistic devotion to the idea of talking computers taking over for writing. He attempts at times to frame the issue as though the survival of the human race depends on forsaking books and newspapers for an oral/aural culture: “[T]he speech-deficiency-based physical and mental illnesses—similar in many ways to sun-, motion-, sleep-, and vitamin-deficiency illnesses—that began to strike the print-literate nations in the 19th Century and that have become an epidemic in the late-20th Century, will continue to spread unchecked.” Anyone want to tell me what he’s talking about? Perhaps if he named or described a few of these “speech-deficiency-based” illnesses and shared how exactly they are related to literacy, it would sound less like delusional gibberish.
There are holes in Crossman’s thesis big enough to drive a New York Times delivery truck through. He claims that most people prefer speaking to writing, but is that always true? Of course it’s usually preferable to speak to someone in person or over the phone than to write them a letter, but does that mean writing is obsolete? What an idiotic notion. How are writers to write without writing? Does Crossman expect that people will dictate their letters, articles, stories, proposals, grocery lists, love notes and lecture materials to VIVO computers, and “proofread” by having the computer read it back to them? Yes, that is exactly what he expects.
How are statistics to be analyzed, records kept, data compiled? How are instructions to be given? How is history to be passed down accurately from generation to generation? All through talking computers with optional graphical interfaces, according to Crossman. “There will be no compelling reason for schools to teach literacy skills,” he writes, as though rendering the entire planet illiterate is the next great leap in our evolution.
Illiteracy is a problem in the United States and in the rest of the world—about that much, Crossman is correct. The solution is education—cheaper, better, more accessible education, to teach those who cannot read or write how, and to improve the skills of those who are able but not proficient. To suggest we solve the problem by making literacy obsolete is unbelievably short-sighted, and coming from the founder of a group advocating the “study of talking computers,” transparently self-serving. It makes my head hurt, it’s such a bad idea.
Let’s assume the world goes Crossman’s way, and in 150 years there is no such thing as written language. The world is populated by nearly 11 billion people (according to moderate United Nations estimates[2]), all of whom are totally illiterate, who depend entirely upon Crossman’s VIVO computers for all their information and communication. A long-term power outage resulting from a natural disaster, war or terrorist attack would leave potentially millions of people completely cut-off from their society. A worldwide disaster, such as nuclear war or a major meteorite impact, could render the planet’s technology useless and leave its surviving people with no choice but to start over again in the Paleolithic era, making tools from bones and rocks, recreating the written languages commanded by their recent ancestors from scratch.
As a colleague of my girlfriend’s said during a discussion of this article at a library meeting, holding up a book, “This works without electricity.”
An apocalyptic nuclear war or asteroid collision is a stretch (hopefully), but even absent such a crippling event, the abandonment of literacy would be disastrous for civilization. Art, history, science, and obviously, literature would be lost.
It just so happens that when I discovered Crossman’s article, I was also reading Carl Sagan’s remarkable book, The Demon-Haunted World. In there, Sagan—who I estimate is smarter at this moment, having been dead for over ten years, than Crossman has been or will ever be—devotes an entire chapter to the vital importance of literacy. The chapter is entitled “The Path to Freedom”:
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. . . . The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. . . . Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe—the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us. (The Demon-Haunted World, pp. 362-363)
The written word, often home to the most beautiful expressions of human language, can evolve and mutate and adapt to new media, but it cannot be abandoned and it cannot be replaced. Forsaking written language is foolish in the extreme and, ultimately for our society, suicidal.
In the United States and other electronically-developed countries, we’re witnessing nothing less than the abandonment of reading and writing . . . and in its place, the recreation of oral culture,” Crossman writes. For this abandonment of writing Crossman neither blames nor credits technology; he argues instead that the cause is evolutionary. He describes written language as a “bridge,” constructed 10,000 years ago by our stone age ancestors and necessary to societal development until very recently, about to be replaced by VIVO computers—Voice In, Voice Out.
Spoken language is the most natural form of communication for humans, Crossman convincingly argues. Most written languages are, afterall, merely symbolic translations of the spoken language. People were speaking long before they were writing. Doesn’t a return to a predominantly oral culture, aided by technology, make a kind of sense?
No.
It makes no sense whatsoever. It offers no benefit to society, and is actually incredibly hazardous to the survival and continued evolution of civilization. The more times I read Crossman’s article, the more I thought about it in preparation for writing this one, the more insane, misguided and inescapably stupid it became.
One thing that makes the article so incredibly unconvincing is that Crossman manufactures statistics to support his argument, but never once cites a source. He claims 80% of all paper manufactured is used to display text. Fair enough, but he also claims 80% of humanity (by conservative estimates) are unable to “use written language effectively.” According to whom? Surely such a monumental survey, producing literacy statistics for every human being on the planet, deserves at least a footnote. But there are none. Elsewhere in the article, Crossman refers to the increasingly weak grasp elementary, middle and high school students have on reading and writing skills, and states that writing teachers are “discouraged and demoralized, and many have basically given up trying to teach it.” Says who? Crossman doesn’t even bother to offer a token perspective from an actual discouraged and demoralized writing teacher to support his statement; we’re just supposed to accept it as conventional wisdom.
The closest thing to a citation on my copy of the essay (which is 100% text printed on 8 sheets of paper) is the contact information for Crossman at the bottom, which identifies him as the founder and director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures. But I’m sure that’s an irrelevant detail.
It does go a long way toward explaining his fetishistic devotion to the idea of talking computers taking over for writing. He attempts at times to frame the issue as though the survival of the human race depends on forsaking books and newspapers for an oral/aural culture: “[T]he speech-deficiency-based physical and mental illnesses—similar in many ways to sun-, motion-, sleep-, and vitamin-deficiency illnesses—that began to strike the print-literate nations in the 19th Century and that have become an epidemic in the late-20th Century, will continue to spread unchecked.” Anyone want to tell me what he’s talking about? Perhaps if he named or described a few of these “speech-deficiency-based” illnesses and shared how exactly they are related to literacy, it would sound less like delusional gibberish.
There are holes in Crossman’s thesis big enough to drive a New York Times delivery truck through. He claims that most people prefer speaking to writing, but is that always true? Of course it’s usually preferable to speak to someone in person or over the phone than to write them a letter, but does that mean writing is obsolete? What an idiotic notion. How are writers to write without writing? Does Crossman expect that people will dictate their letters, articles, stories, proposals, grocery lists, love notes and lecture materials to VIVO computers, and “proofread” by having the computer read it back to them? Yes, that is exactly what he expects.
How are statistics to be analyzed, records kept, data compiled? How are instructions to be given? How is history to be passed down accurately from generation to generation? All through talking computers with optional graphical interfaces, according to Crossman. “There will be no compelling reason for schools to teach literacy skills,” he writes, as though rendering the entire planet illiterate is the next great leap in our evolution.
Illiteracy is a problem in the United States and in the rest of the world—about that much, Crossman is correct. The solution is education—cheaper, better, more accessible education, to teach those who cannot read or write how, and to improve the skills of those who are able but not proficient. To suggest we solve the problem by making literacy obsolete is unbelievably short-sighted, and coming from the founder of a group advocating the “study of talking computers,” transparently self-serving. It makes my head hurt, it’s such a bad idea.
Let’s assume the world goes Crossman’s way, and in 150 years there is no such thing as written language. The world is populated by nearly 11 billion people (according to moderate United Nations estimates[2]), all of whom are totally illiterate, who depend entirely upon Crossman’s VIVO computers for all their information and communication. A long-term power outage resulting from a natural disaster, war or terrorist attack would leave potentially millions of people completely cut-off from their society. A worldwide disaster, such as nuclear war or a major meteorite impact, could render the planet’s technology useless and leave its surviving people with no choice but to start over again in the Paleolithic era, making tools from bones and rocks, recreating the written languages commanded by their recent ancestors from scratch.
As a colleague of my girlfriend’s said during a discussion of this article at a library meeting, holding up a book, “This works without electricity.”
An apocalyptic nuclear war or asteroid collision is a stretch (hopefully), but even absent such a crippling event, the abandonment of literacy would be disastrous for civilization. Art, history, science, and obviously, literature would be lost.
It just so happens that when I discovered Crossman’s article, I was also reading Carl Sagan’s remarkable book, The Demon-Haunted World. In there, Sagan—who I estimate is smarter at this moment, having been dead for over ten years, than Crossman has been or will ever be—devotes an entire chapter to the vital importance of literacy. The chapter is entitled “The Path to Freedom”:
Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. . . . The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. . . . Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe—the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us. (The Demon-Haunted World, pp. 362-363)
The written word, often home to the most beautiful expressions of human language, can evolve and mutate and adapt to new media, but it cannot be abandoned and it cannot be replaced. Forsaking written language is foolish in the extreme and, ultimately for our society, suicidal.
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