The Sound Of The Future

The Sound Of The Future is a book about the vanguard of voice-assisted technologies as the new way to interact with the internet, specifically a chapter about accessibility and inclusion of different languages in the voice models. In many African countries and especially in India, where there’s not enough support for all the dialects, one person was saying it was very hard to interact with the world because you’re set up to fail--it’s not including your culture. 

If language doesn’t exist in the technology space it is almost as if you don’t exist at all. That is the way the world is structured today and if you spend all your time online every day, and the only language you encounter is English, Spanish, or Mandarin, then it tends to define the way you interact with the world over time. You tend to lose either interest in your own language or your own competence in that language.

The corollary in art and music is that when you’re online all the time and on social media, you become accustomed to working that way. Over time I think it affects the way that you look at your own world (the “aesthetic erosion” phenomenon). One day you realize that you forgot how to do something and your skills had gone fallow. In photography, fewer people are using SLR cameras because smartphone cameras are more convenient for sharing images on social media, so the look of the photography changes. Sometimes they look like they were made for social media, and not for aesthetics or ideas. As your sense of aesthetics slowly erodes, your house will tumble over the cliff and out to sea. It’s important to hold on to roots as technology changes. 

12/6/2023

[12/6/2024: Another perfect example of AI-generated art and music that will roll over us if we’re not careful. Again, it’s the idea of convenience and instant gratification, or simply capitulating to your cynicism as sour grapes].