The power of speech, the opposable thumbs and a mysterious brain.

Mandrila Biswas
2 min readJul 1, 2018

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Professional okra chopper in an Indian canteen. Photo: Mandrila

Talking. The big thing in technology now is to make talking a richer and multi-faceted way of communication. Talking not just to people but also to machines. Humans have mostly used their opposable thumbs to conquer the physical world through muscle power; and now the power of speech to move, motivate and vex.

Ergonomics, user-friendly, usability, userbility, etcetera… Even to this date, designers thrive on iterating products that are compatible with this unique set of opposable thumbs… How do you grab a phone to click a selfie?… Should the fingerprint sensor on your mobile be on the home button, the rear side or on the side edge?… Be it a bottle, a shoe-string, a pair of chopsticks, a door knob or a typing interface… Oh and did you know that in the tech community, chatting means typing? It's no longer what grandmas did with their neighbours on lazy afternoons. And now talking through a phone is being ‘on a call’. So when a colleague asked me to ‘call’ another one, it took me some time to decide whether she meant a phone call or a vocal seek.

Technology is now high on the vision of humanising machines. Teaching machines to react like humans has been a dream long since. So speech is the power we want to bless machines with for now. It is a notion that bewilders the very basis of human to human interactions. But why let ethics hold back a plausible emergence.

Teaching is often said to be the best method of learning, mostly due to the factor of feedback. Because as a teacher, one is susceptible to more number and varieties of feedbacks that a teacher is able to realign, re-learn, re-know and eventually re-teach. Somewhere in the process the roles get reversed and re-reversed and we find ourselves dwindling in this eternal loop. And the loop dwindles too within a greater loop of purpose, destinations and goals. Therefore, it becomes of prime importance to define this destination where we want to head. And that remains the greatest mystery of all times. We seek our purposes in the cosmos, in our intuitions and the human brain. After all, the brain has more connections than that in the universe.

Word cookie: kothopokothon, Bengali for conversation

Reference: http://www.pangaro.com/conversation-theory-in-one-hour.html

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Mandrila Biswas
Mandrila Biswas

Written by Mandrila Biswas

Delving into experiences, consciousness and intelligence

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