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"People are choosing to allow television and Electronic Arts to do all their imagining for them."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Electrosecretary | ||
| An automatic transcription device. |
There is no room on the moon for people who do jobs that can be handled by expert machinery.
| When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further...
He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosecs were "she"), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. |
| Technovelgy from A Fall of Moondust,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Clarke also correctly realizes the limits of even futuristic voice-recognition technology:
As far as I know, the first science fiction writer to suggest that a machine could transcribe the spoken word into words typed onto a page was David H. Keller; see the entry for vibrowriter from his poignant 1934 short story The Lost Language.
Compare also to the
telescribe from A Question of Salvage (1939) by Malcom Jameson, the
speakwrite from 1984 (1948) by George Orwell and the
transcriber from Second Foundation (1953) by Isaac Asimov.
...no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
