Star Trek was way ahead of its time. What if Google is as well?
In today’s world we can celebrate so many anniversaries these days, but this one is close to my heart: this week marks the anniversary of The Cage, the pilot episode of Star Trek. Being a Trekkie, and owning all episodes on DVD, it has been an important part of my television-viewing life. And there have been many young people inspired to go into engineering, due to the cool science (fiction) in the show.
The show also showed the first instance of wireless communications, namely the Communicator. When the show aired in the ’60s nobody had heard or seen any mobile communication devices for every day use.
And there is another cool Star Trek invention: the universal translator. To quote the wiki entry:
The universal translator (also referred to as a “UT” or translator circuit) is a device used to decipher and interpret alien languages into the native language of the user.
This was an obvious play from the writers to make it easy. Any alien race could speak English all of a sudden. But what if we can apply the same technology on earth, in the year 2009? Would it not be amazing of I can read all text on the web in Dutch, and if I write something in Dutch, it would appear as English, French, Russian, Farsi? And I can go on with hundreds of languagues.
Could Google be having this in mind with Google Translate? At the moment it is limited to text or web pages, but what if Google Voice would be standard on each mobile phone? Implanting a device into a person is for the moment maybe a step too far, but who knew we would be openly talking about our every day life on a web site, say 50 years ago?
Your thoughts? Where do you see this going?
October 15, 2009 at 6:42 pm |
A well thought out a interesting post thanks
October 15, 2009 at 6:52 pm |
[...] & Google. 15 10 2009 Came across an interesting post regarding Star Trek technology the translator and Google. well worth a few moments to [...]