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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
 |
| Electrosecretary | ||
| An automatic transcription device. |
There is no room on the moon for people who do jobs that can be handled by expert machinery.
| When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further...
He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosecs were "she"), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. |
| Technovelgy from A Fall of Moondust,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Clarke also correctly realizes the limits of even futuristic voice-recognition technology:
As far as I know, the first science fiction writer to suggest that a machine could transcribe the spoken word into words typed onto a page was David H. Keller; see the entry for vibrowriter from his poignant 1934 short story The Lost Language.
Compare also to the
telescribe from A Question of Salvage (1939) by Malcom Jameson, the
speakwrite from 1984 (1948) by George Orwell and the
transcriber from Second Foundation (1953) by Isaac Asimov.
...no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.
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More Ideas
and Technology from A Fall of Moondust
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Tech news articles related to works by Arthur C. Clarke
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
