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"Concepts of religion may now be goals of science and engineering."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Speaker Chips | ||
| Integrated circuit chips placed in books; they could read the book and advertise it. |
I think I can wait for this product. It is bad enough that bookstores place little slivers of metal here and there in the book, as antitheft devices.
| Without thinking, Kaye turned right and found herself in the religious section. Most of the shelves were filled with brightly colored apocalypse novels. The E-paper holograms leaped from lurid covers as she passed: endtime, rapture, revelation, demons and dark angels. Most of the books had speaker chips that could read out the entire story. The same chips replaced jacket copy with vocal come-ons. The shelves murmured softly in a wave, like ghosts triggered by Kaye's brief passage. |
| Technovelgy from Darwin's Children,
by Greg Bear. Published by Del Rey in 2003 Additional resources -
|
You can actually find real things like this on shelves in stores - just not in United States. I saw a light saber that a friend of mine had purchased for his son in Japan. The light saber had a voice chip installed inside it; when you bought the device in its original package, the light saber was connected to the package. You could push buttons on the outside of the package, and the light saber would tell you, in Japanese, about the product.
I guess I should be glad that those little slivers of metal used as anti-theft devices can't talk. Hearing "I hope you intend to pay for me..." over and over would be irritating.
Compare to the memo-voice from War Game (1959) by Philip K. Dick.
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Tech news articles related to Darwin's Children
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Speaker Chips-related
news articles:
- Product RFID Tags Now Play Jingles
- VW Talking Newspaper Ad
| 'Facetime Facelift' Beautifies Video Chats |
| Meeting Wendy Of Wendy's |
| Narrative Science And Phil Dick's Homeostatic Newspaper |
| BookTrack Adds Sound To Books |
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
