VIVO Voice-In / Voice-Out. William Crossman

their voice-recognition software exactly the way it is supposed to be used. Isn’t that why we’re developing VIVOs? Isn’t that what they’re for? Don’t we want students to be able to input their ideas orally online and teachers to be able to access those ideas aurally? Voice-in, voice-out: simple.

      We developed written language to store and retrieve information, and we are developing talking computers to perform the very same function. Because talking computers will do it more easily, quickly, efficiently, universally, and (ultimately) cheaply, they will replace written language. Simple.

      We used to cut our grass with a scythe; then, we invented the push lawn mower and put the scythe in a museum; then, we invented the gasoline-engine lawn mower and put the push lawn mower in the museum. That’s the way technology works, and the way we work with technology: we are forever replacing the old with the new.

      In the case of written language, however, we are replacing a technology (written language) with a non-technology (spoken language), but we are giving the non-technology a new technological twist: an electronic echo, a gigantic memory capable of storing and retrieving an almost unlimited amount of information in the form of speech.

      Written language was a technology created by our ancestors to help them deal with a specific set of historical needs and conditions in a specific historical period several thousand years ago. Today, we are creating VIVO technology to answer a different set of needs and conditions in our own historical period. Soon we’ll be placing written language on the museum wall next to the scythe.

      Just as some students today might join a choral group, karate club, or chess club as a pleasurable pastime, some mid-21st Century students might join a literacy club to learn written language for fun. But there will be no compelling reason why they would need to learn to read and write and, therefore, no compelling reason why they should have to learn it—or why their schools should have to teach it. Exit the school literacy crisis.

      Not only education but also the arts and, possibly, international relations will be transformed in the shift from print to oral culture.

      Imagine the literary arts without written language, and the musical arts without written music: a return to storytelling, spoken poetry, and improvised music.

      Imagine international relations without written language: dominant nations would no longer be able to force other nations to read, write, and become educated in the former’s “standard” languages—a traditional weapon of cultural domination—and would no longer be able to decide which individuals, in the dominated nations, would be allowed to become literate.

      These are just two examples of areas in which VIVOs, or, more accurately, people using VIVOs, will reshape the world in the 21st Century. In this book, I take the viewpoint that good results could possibly come from the fact that talking computers will soon take over written language’s job. Lovers of the written word—and I am one of you—I invite you to give the following ideas a hearing.

      The creation of VIVOs will create new potential opportunities for people in three areas.

      • VIVOs will create new potential opportunities for the world’s nonliterate and semi-literate people to be able to access—through speech or signing alone—the world’s storehouse of information and knowledge. For the first time since the introduction of written language, people’s nonliteracy or semi-literacy won’t prevent their accessing all stored information.

      Pre-VIVO electronic technologies have already actualized similar potential opportunities for millions, maybe billions, of people worldwide. Within a period of about sixty years, a huge amount of information that had been formerly inaccessible, because it had been stored in the form of written language, has become available to people who can’t write or read. Radio, video, stereo, film, telephone, and computer have opened up an oral-aural and/or non-text visual universe of stored information for the non-readers and non-writers who have finally been able to gain access to these technologies.

      Sixty years isn’t a long time. The very existence of written language on Earth for sixty-hundred years or more has profoundly affected and reshaped all cultures and communities—even those that are still oral cultures. Now, even before VIVOs sprout from our wrists and lapels, radio, video, and the rest have been busily, and irreversibly, reshaping global reality once more.

      • VIVOs will create new potential opportunities for all people, whether literate or not, to instantaneously communicate in all languages with other speakers or information storage units. Using today’s “old-fashioned” text-entry computers and text-translator software, a person can communicate in writing with another person who reads and writes another language. The problem is that both people must already be able to read, write, and enter text in at least one language, their own.

      Using VIVOs, we won’t need to know how to read or write, won’t need to be verbally fluent in any language other than our own native language, and won’t even need to understand a universal language like Esperanto. VIVO units will allow people around the world to speak easily with one another in their respective native languages, thanks to VIVO’s simultaneous speech translation function. Electronic Esperanto!

      • VIVOs will create new potential opportunities to access stored information for many people who can speak and hear, or sign and see, but whose physical and/or mental disabilities make it difficult or impossible for them to write and/or read.

      I’ve italicized the words “potential opportunity” in these three bullets with good reason. The most that the birth of a new technology can possibly achieve is to open potential opportunities for people. These opportunities can only become actualized when people actually gain access to the technology and utilize it.

      Here’s a familiar example. Since most people in the world can speak and hear, they have the ability to use the telephone. But most of the world’s people haven’t had access to telephones—and still don’t—because of the high cost of service and/or the unavailability of service in their communities. True, the huge jump in the number of wireless cellular-phone users around the globe is starting to redraw this picture. Yet it’s also still true that, while the invention of the telephone has opened up the potential opportunity for everyone to speak across long distances, and more people are using phones worldwide, a telephone still remains out of reach for the billions of people who haven’t been able to get their hands on one.

      The birth of a new technology, by itself, can’t change anything. People having access to and using the new technology can create change and make history.

      For the foreseeable future, which includes the VIVO Age of the 21st Century, the issue will continue to be: who controls the new technology and, therefore, who controls whom. As with all technology, talking-computer hardware and software will be developed, patented, copyrighted, programmed, manufactured, encrypted, sold, bought, leased, used, distributed, and shared—or not shared—by those with the wealth and resources to control these processes.

      In my opinion, it would be great if all the nonliterate and semi-literate people around the world could actually start using VIVOs on January 1, 2010 to access the world’s databanks. But it would be naive to think this will happen automatically just because the technology itself will exist on January 1, 2010. If people want access to talking computers, if we want to actualize the potential opportunities VIVO technology presents to us, we’ve got to figure out how to do it . . . and then do it.

      The right to have access to the stored information, the collective knowledge, of our community, our society, and our world is a human right. The ability to read and write, print-literacy, is still the key that opens these information vaults. Yet, billions of people around the world are being denied access to this information because they remain nonliterate or semi-literate. Most of the world’s people still haven’t received their keys. Literacy has historically been treated as a privilege, rather than a right, by those who hold the master keys—and it’s as true today as ever.

      Most people in the world haven’t even seen a library. If they were able to travel to a library, and if they were able to find its door open to them—for many libraries’ doors would not be—they would