I am Borg?
I’ve seen some of you poking fun at people with bluetooth headsets, and I’ve joined in from time to time, but I think I only did so because headsets were the popular thing to hate, like the 9mm or Pokemon.
It started last night. I was looking for a piece of Windows Mobile software I had been telling my uncle about, and along the way found a bunch of shiny new freeware playthings for my AT&T Tilt. One of them locked up my phone. Hard. So hard that I had to do a wipe of the system memory. Normally this is not a big deal since you’d have a backup of your contacts, etc on Outlook where you last synced the PDA. But I don’t have Outlook. I also never got around to getting one of those nice programs that backs up your contacts to your flash card.
So I uh, guess now’s as good a time as ever to do those firmware upgrades, huh?
Long story short, I found a program that tricks your phone into playing an MP3 over a bluetooth headset. I’m not planning to listen to the White Stripes over a mono bluetooth audio signal, but it seems like a dang handy thing for listening to audiobooks while doing housework or (maybe?) sitting at my desk at work. When a phone call comes in, it reads the name of the caller, and I press the button on my ear to pause the audio file and pick up the phone.
That’s a neat capability, but it’s not worth buying the $35 headset on its own. So why did I swallow my pride and get one? I suppose that the best way of putting it is that I have a certain technology fetish: a pipe dream that nobody is likely to make happen for me any time soon, but which I’ll still spend unhealthy amounts of time fantasizing about.
My tech fetish started way back in middle school when I read the Ender’s Game series (by the way, the first book is great, don’t ruin it by reading the rest unless you’re a diehard fan with low expectations). In the mostly bland sequels to the first fantastic book, an accidentally created artificial sentience named Jane communicates with Ender via a small device in his ear:
Jane is first introduced in Speaker for the Dead as an advanced computer program. She is extremely complex, capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously, and has millions of levels of attention, even her most unaware one being much more alert than a human. Jane is hesitant to reveal herself to humanity, because she knows that she is the epitome of humanity’s fear: an intelligent, thinking, computer program that cannot be controlled. She decided to reveal herself to Ender after she found out he wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon. She also “remembered” he was the only student to pass the Giant’s Drink, one of the many Fantasy Game situations.
A jewel in Ender’s ear allows both of them to communicate and for her to see and hear everything from Ender’s vantage point. She helps Ender with many things. For example, in the very beginning, she contacts an orbiting ship and pays $40 billion for it and the cargo. Ender’s reliance on Jane becomes obvious when she no longer helps him; he must ask Olhado to help him with his finances but Ender doesn’t even know what his own password is.
It continued when I recently read Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which featured a logistics computer that became self-aware and was nicknamed Mike:
In Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the character Mycroft Holmes is a self-aware computer system entrusted with running the life-support systems, communications, payroll and many other things, in a penal colony underground in the Moon or “Luna”. Mycroft eventually sides with characters inciting a revolution to free Luna, and is instrumental in their victory against the Lunar Authority on Earth.
In both these books the friendly omniscient computer helped the protagonists by being their eyes and ears, handling things for them and allowing them to effectively be in several places at once. The computer was awake and alert when its human friends were asleep or distracted, it had a perfect memory, and access to a vast network of rapidly available public knowledge.
Why can’t we have something like that now? I mean, yeah, we’re not quite ready for sentient computers. But surely some clever scripting, some speech recognition, and some synthetic voice work could be combined to give a human being quick answers to specific queries, driving directions, email/SMS notifications, and access to news and weather. Maybe one could click one’s earpiece, say “What’s Jena Six?” and have the computer retrieve and read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. Then one could choose to have the computer continue reading the info, or tag it for later listening, or tag it for later browsing in front of a proper terminal, or have it brought up on the screen of the PDA so it can be read without messing with navigating to the proper page.
So I’ll continue to listen to my podcasts between answering calls on the silly button attached to my ear. You can mock me, but I’m afraid that this is the price of progress. We got used to people flying through the air and being able to call up information about the War of 1812 in under five seconds and being able to propel a multi-ton hunk of steel and dead dinosaurs just to go get ice cream. So come on, tell me that a small headset in public is all that crazy.