Forsee The Speakularity

James Somers at Nautilus on the “Speakularity“:

We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken aloud will calcify as text, into a Record that will be referenced, searched, and mined. .. Think of all the reasons that you search through your email. Suddenly your own speech will be available in just the same way. “Show me all conversations with Michael before January of last year … What was the address of that restaurant Mum recommended? …” Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a co-author of a forthcoming book on evolutionary psychology, has speculated that we might all get in the habit of peppering our speech with keywords, to help us look it up later. …

Much of what is said aloud would be published and made part of the Web. An unfathomable mass of expertise, opinion, wit, and culture—now lost—would be as accessible as any article or comment thread is today. ..

It won’t reshape the basic ways we live and love. It won’t turn our brains to mush, or make us supermen. . .. People talk a lot—on average, about 40 percent of their waking lives. .. anyone who’s ever recorded someone knows that self-conscious monitoring of your own speech is just too mentally expensive to carry on for very long. … After a short while, you go back to normal.

Hanson also thinks “normal” would be the operative word once ubiquitous speech transcription arrives. He’s not convinced that it would change the world as much as some seem to think it would. “As soon as you see just how different our world is from 1,000 years ago, it’s really hard to get very worked up about this,” he says.

There was almost no privacy 1,000 years ago, he explains. Living quarters were dense. Rooms were tiny … Other people could overhear your lovemaking. When you traveled, you hardly ever went by yourself; you roamed around in little groups. Most people lived in small towns, where most everybody knew everybody else and gossiped about them. The differences in how we lived between then and now were huge. And yet we adapted. “I gotta figure the changes we’re looking at are small by comparison,” he says. …

Having a Record will just give us a new dimension on which to map a capacity we’ve always had. People who are constantly being recorded will adapt to that fact by becoming expert at knowing what’s in the transcript and what’s not. They’ll be like parents talking around children. They’ll become masters of plausible deniability. They’ll use sarcasm, or they’ll grimace or grin or lean their head back or smirk, or they’ll direct their gaze, so as to say a thing without saying it.

It sounds exhausting, but of course we already fluidly adapt to the spectrum of private, small-group, and public conversations—just go to a workplace. Or go to a party. We are constantly asking and answering subtle questions about our audience, and tuning our speech based on the answers. (Is Jack in earshot? Is Jack’s wife in earshot?)

“There’s no way this means that everything we say is now in the open,” Hanson argues. “There’s a layer of what we say that’s in the open … but we’re always talking at several levels at once.” … Our brains adapted to writing, to libraries, and to the Web. They will adapt to the Record. And people will, anyway, continue to be less concerned with how they sound than with how they look. (more)

Even if this change is smaller than changes to which we’ve already adapted, still it will be a real change. The biggest open question is what fraction of our speech will go directly into a public record. I find it hard to believe this would be the majority, but then I wouldn’t have predicted how much people are willing to say publicly on Twitter or Facebook.

Even for speech that isn’t directly made public, we would all know that everyone who heard a conversation had a private record, from which they could choose to privately share selected quotes. Of course we already worry about people quoting things we say in private to others, but direct recordings would be more believable and thus more worrisome. Laws prohibiting such recordings could reduce such problems, but would hardly eliminate them.

The big obvious change to predict is that we will be less clear and direct, even in private, when saying things that might make us look bad when quoted later. Already twitter speak tends to be more sarcastic, ironic, and loaded with local references that make it harder for outsiders to clearly understand. Expect most ordinary speech to move in this direction.