
The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993) - benbreen
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/16/magazine/the-telephone-transformed-into-almost-everything.html
======
jbullock35
This hasn't held up well:

> Martin E. P. Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of
> Pennsylvania [...] has been monitoring the temperature of emotional
> incidents on the computer network to see how they differ from "real time"
> emotion. The constraints of the form tend to flatten anger and push toward
> civility, he finds.

~~~
wutbrodo
I wonder if this was just population effects. The group of people
communicating over the internet in 1993 is not the same as the group of people
doing so today.

~~~
johnwalkr
Eternal September was in 1993.

------
chmod775
>"Oh," he says. "You mean why no voice dialing? Saying 'Get Fred' or 'Get Sam'
or something? I don't have a voice dialer." He will soon, surely. Any day now,
he will be able to pick up a phone anywhere and say "Call home" to a network
that will recognize his voice and look up his home number (verifying his
credit by means of his voiceprint).

In hindsight that's a... yesn't.

~~~
ashleyn
Only way I see something like that working is AI/ML and you'd need to vastly
expand voice bandwidth past what PSTN is in order to have enough information
for it to work. And even then who's to say people's voices, verbal
idiosyncrasies, accents aren't still too similar to differentiate?

~~~
doctorshady
For whatever it's worth, I've seen AT&T experiment with voice recognition for
authentication. One of the Achiles' Heels of the system is you can collect a
lot of the samples you need to bypass it from peoples' voicemail greetings.
Especially if like for some jobs, they're required to re-record the greeting
every day, i.e. "Today is Monday, June 17th, and I'm in the office..."

That being said, linear predictive codecs used in mobile/lower bandwidth IP
networks have damaged the sound quality of the PSTN quite significantly (some
are even vocoderized). If you're just dealing with, say, g.711 in wireline
networks (when this was written, aside from g.722 in some ISDN networks, g.711
was used almost exclusively; GSM was very much a niche in its infancy), you
might be able to squeak by with enough data to reliably recognize people.

------
doctorshady
In a way, this sorta seems like it was an inevitability; humans are a very
social species. It only makes sense that our advancements in tech would, first
and foremost, promote that.

------
pvijeh
wish it wasnt paywalled--- what does it say ?

~~~
cosmojg
[http://archive.is/ThQGB](http://archive.is/ThQGB)

~~~
a5withtrrs
I thought archive.is no longer works...??? Edit: it doesn't work for me still.
Edit again: Australia blocks it at an IP level?

~~~
boplicity
Ha! Systemic copyright infringement shouldn't be easy.

~~~
cosmojg
Why not?

