Page 124 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Universal Human Interface

“My turn again? Sorry. I must have dozed off for a moment.”
Leith Mauker raised his brow and blinked rapidly. “I’m not a night
person, I admit. This is my last presentation tonight. It’s about
relationships.” One of the ladies in attendance groaned. “No, not
another alien or robot or mutant monkey in love with a lab
assistant! I’m talking about system interfaces, how one organism or
mechanism communicates with another. So it’s ultimately
technology versus biology, the production and transmission of
symbolic information being the bone of contention. Obviously
signaling predates and coexists with morphemes of all sorts. Before
digital machines appeared, humanity interfaced with spoken and
written language in shared communities. Since the time of Babel,
going beyond one’s linguistic group requires translation. Since the
advent of cybernetics, human-to-electronic connection has moved
from dials, knobs, switches, keyboards and buttons to sensors on
the verge of mind-reading. But just as most humans know only a
few natural languages, few of us are able to be conversant in every
set of commands or the means of using them on the multiplicity of
devices available to extend our capabilities in work and play. That
has created an inequality as profound as any in society—
educational, economic, cultural—and increasingly drives the
division between haves and have-nots.”
“At the same time as the number and types of external situations
demanding interaction with machines have increased, we as a
species have become cyborganic: the plethora of electromechanical
devices worn, carried and implanted has made it virtually impossible
to function without them—and they each have their own sort of
language to be mastered. True, some efforts have been made to
create so-called “smart” voice-activated units using the same basic
computer code, but that, again, is limited to the well-off. No, what
is needed, and what I wish to present as a fictional technology, is
the universal human interface. It would be on or in the head, and be
able to ‘talk’ with any and every electronic gadget on the planet.”

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