The Force is woke

As you may know, they made another Star Wars movie.  It’s called The Force Awakens.

(Helpful links to my rewatch of the original trilogy: one, two, three.)

Like pretty much everyone else, my reaction is “Whew, they made a good Star Wars movie.” SW is supposed to be heroic, spectacular, and just a bit cheesy, and that’s just what they achieved.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that it’s kind of a remake of the first film. I’d say that’s true of the last half of the film— the whole Starkiller thing. The first half, with the introduction of Finn and Rey, feels more original. And even if it is a reboot, it’s a very sure-footed one. The acting, the fighting, and the spectacle are really better than the original.

I think Harrison Ford really sells the movie. There’s an art to delivering prime movie cheese. If you don’t accept it, it turns into camp, and if you’re too earnest, it seems laughable in a different way. Ford gets the balance exactly right. He makes his age work for the movie: he’s a tired, tough old rogue, and yet he never upstages the newcomers, but gently welcomes them into the series.

(It’s a narrative danger for a movie or book series or comic to fall in love with itself. You  assume that the audience adores your characters, and you start to treat them portentously, have secondary characters do everything for them, and you forget to actually make them still likable. Danger averted here: Han earns his hero status all over again for this movie.)

The weakest part of the movie is also the riskiest move: Kylo Ren, the emergent emo Sith Lord. I like that he isn’t Darth Vader; he’s young and a little naive, and makes mistakes. That’s a far more interesting Dark Lord to work with. He does better than (shudder) Hayden Christopher, and yet it’s a little hard to take him seriously when he takes off his helmet. He doesn’t do much to show why the Dark Side attracts him, or maybe the script just doesn’t let him do so.

I like the character of  Finn.  Was this someone’s elevator pitch? “Let’s see a Stormtrooper start to question his role.” Not a bad idea at all. I almost wish the elevator guy had convinced Abrams to make that the whole movie, because learning how the Stormtroopers operate and what the human beings inside the plastic suits are like would have been interesting. (They can’t all be motivated by fear, can they?  What do they do off duty? Are there a bunch of gung-ho Trumpists who just love Stormtrooping? Is Finn the only one with doubts?)

Rey is great, and I think she fits in with my contention that women make better video game protagonists. We feel what we see, so a stoic space marine lessens what we feel— if he doesn’t seem to care about what’s happening, why should we? Rey reacts viscerally to everything she goes through.

Her character arc is small here: basically from “wants to go home” to “wants to help out”. She doesn’t have to learn to be a hero; she’s heroic throughout. That’s a major difference from A New Hope, in fact, though in part it’s just that Finn gets the role of “guy out of his depth who has to step up”.  In a sense the usual transformation is applied to the audience instead: we expect an untrained nobody, we suspect Finn is going to be the New Luke, and we keep getting shown that Rey is the more competent one.

It’s tempting to say that a character needs more flaws and setbacks, but that isn’t always the case. Plenty of popular characters are pretty much always heroic. Besides, they’ll probably throw a lot of bad shit at her in Episode 8.

When I think about the story it feels a little contrived, or to put it another way, it’s a little too convenient that people always end up just where they need to be for the next bit of plot. But I didn’t really care about that while watching, and it probably wouldn’t have added much to paper over the contrivances— it’d just lengthen the movie for no great narrative gain. (Example: the raid on Maz Kanata’s planet, which conveniently takes place just after the plot points have been covered. It wouldn’t have been hard to, say, make it a week later. But it works emotionally to have everything happen almost in real time.)

(A bigger hole, I think: they destroyed the capital of the New  Republic, right? Everyone is awfully blasé about that; they react much more to the death of one guy, albeit an important one. The one thing the movie doesn’t sell is the size of the galaxy. Compare the war in Consider Phlebas, which destroyed 90 million ships, 14,000 orbitals, and 53 planets. In many ways Star Wars feels like it has about a hundred planets total.)

OK, onto the traditional notes I took while watching…

• The opening crawl is less amazeballs in 2015.
• I’ve never quite got why everyone understands Droid but the audience.
• That huge ship would make a great video game level. But really, all she could find in it to salvage is a double handful of parts?
• Is it a good idea to steal that droid from the guy who’s stealing it?
• Finn sometimes overplays the nebbishness.
• I’ve played so many Bethesda games that I would’ve kept the armor to sell it.
• Darth wouldn’t’ve trashed his own terminal, he’d’ve trashed the underling.
• This whole section of the film doesn’t feel  like A New Hope at all.
• “We shall see”— you may be Sith, Lord Snopes, but you could be a little more supportive.
• OK, that’s a cantina scene.
• No, Rey, never go down into a dungeon alone!
• It’s taking these dudes a long time to commit to the cause. C’mon, folks, we know you got nothing to go back to.
• Why is this big galactic laser beam visible from entirely different star systems? The galaxy never really feels like it’s the size of a galaxy.
• Does anyone in-universe ever wonder why random people have a different accent?
• Leia’s first appearance gives off a strong Hillary vibe.
• My sufferance for C3PO hasn’t improved.
• Hard not to look at Kylo Ren and think of Reaper.
• Outsmarted, Kylo!  Try not to destroy your terminal again.
• OK, Bigger Death Star, this is looking like a reboot.
• The Falcon does pretty well with all this knocking into the scenery.
• Everything is always so overbuilt in this universe. Wouldn’t plain drywall have been cheaper?
• Here’s how well I’d expect a soldier trained with a laser rifle to do with a lightsabre: poorly. So from that point of view Finn is doing well.
• “How fast is the weapon charging?” “At the speed of plot, sir.”
• How does a planet collapse?  Was it full of air bladders?
• The Starkiller episode kind of violates Mamet’s tenet of plot. Rather than repeatedly trying something and failing, the Rebels— sorry, the Resistance— come up with a plan and it works as planned on the first try.
• BB8 didn’t get to go along on the final quest?
• Pretty long denouement for an action movie.
• How was that map made?  Did many Gungans die for it?  Also, why did no one not recognize a huge frigging section of the Galaxy?  People live in the Galaxy, they will know its shape.  It’s like getting a map of Europe and saying “I have no idea how this fits on the globe!”

Join me in about two years for Episode 8!

 

 

Ask Zompist: Are we all doomed?

The recent wave of terrorist attacks has made me worry if technology will ever, or during this century, advance to the point where regular terrorists are able to destroy the world. Humanity has, so far, survived 71 years when it was possible to blow up the world if you had the resources of a superpower. But what if technology advances further to the point where destroying the world gets within the means of your average, run-of-the-mill doomsday cult? Or even a deranged individual like Ted Kaczynski?

Related to this, I think if we would really live in a world like that of James Bond movies or superhero comics, with supervillains regularly trying to destroy the world, the world wouldn’t survive for long: in order for the world to survive, the James Bonds/superheroes would have to win every single time, while in order for the world to be destroyed, the villains would only have to win once. And eventually that one time would come- if you keep rolling the dice, sooner or later they will come up six.

–Raphael

Man, with Britain voting to screw itself, Turkey going full dictatorship, and Trump promoting fascism here, to say nothing of humans slowly roasting the ecosphere, you don’t have enough to worry about?

For what it’s worth, if the world gets blown up, it’s still more likely to be a superpower that does it. Or at least a medium-sized state. This isn’t meant as a reassurance; it’s a reminder that we’ve escaped from nuclear holocaust by the skin of our teeth several times.  Here’s a Mefi page on near misses.

For non-state actors, a weak consolation is that though they are careless about human life, they are rarely self-genocidal. That is, there’s a rough rationality to extremism: atrocities are cheap and get attention, but the extremists do not actually want their enemies to destroy them all, because of course then their cause is dead. Of course, like any other politicians, extremists can misjudge likely results. Osama bin Laden probably didn’t plan on getting killed in a raid.

It’s always worthwhile to get some historical perspective. Here’s a chart of terrorist deaths over 40 years:

That is, outside of three countries (two of which are basically in civil war), terrorism is down worldwide. (Also, for comparison, the annual number of road traffic deaths is 1.25 million.)  Nothing to be complacent about, but we can too easily get the impression from the news that everything is terrible and always getting worse.

If you’re thinking of futuristic threats, it’s also worth remembering that people will have a strong motivation to develop futuristic counters. It’s not great worldbuilding (or prediction) to suppose that some agents get doomsday-in-a-box weapons and the motivation to use them, while their enemies have no clue about this, no similar weapons, and no conceivable responses.

Not that doom is impossible! But terrorists generally have their own enemies, they don’t want to destroy the world, and their abilities are limited. But feel free to be terrified of Trump with the nuclear football.

 

The Islanders

I’ve never read any Christopher Priest before, and The Prestige was recommended.  The library didn’t have it, but they had The Islanders, and I figured what the hell.

First, what is it?  It’s sf, of precisely the sort that explains why I use sf instead of ‘science fiction’.  It’s set on another planet, but it could easily pass as mainstream fiction, or magic realism. It reminds me of Borges, and even more of Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi, which tells the story of a Paris apartment story, room by room.

The Islanders calls itself a gazetteer, and in form it purports to be a tourist’s guidebook to the Dream Archipelago, a worldwide array of thousands of islands on another planet— though honestly it’s all so British that we’d might as well call it an alternative Earth.  The planet also has two large polar continents.  One, Nordmaieure, consists of “quarrelsome nation states” engaged in a perpetual war, which in eminently civilized fashion is actually fought in the uninhabited southern continent, Sudmaieure.  The archipelago is neutral, though to get to the battlegrounds troops have to pass through it, so it is hardly unaffected by the war.

The book is arranged alphabetically, from Aay to Yannet, giving descriptions of geography and local attractions, and a listing of what currencies are accepted. It’s soon evident that this is merely a pseudo-pedantic scaffolding for telling stories about the Islands and Islanders: love stories, a murder mystery, meditations on art, some incursions into horror. The gazetteer style is frequently abandoned in favor of news reporting, court reports, memoirs, or third-person stories.

The “Introductory” by an Islander notable, Chaster Kammeston, provides a fair appraisal and fair warning: “It is a typical island enterprise: it is incomplete, a bit muddled, and it wants to be liked.” And in fact I found it extremely readable. I finished it quickly and found none of it boring.

There are standalone stories, such as one of the horror ones, classified under the island Seevl. The manner is Lovecraftian: the story starts out as something of a love story, narrated by a man named Torm, and takes its time to get to the mystery of the ruined towers that cluster on Seevl.

But many of the stories are interconnected, though unreliably. The introducer, Chaster Kammeston, explains that no true map of the archipelago is possible, due to “temporal gradients.”  Later this is explained further: if you circumnavigate an island, you’ll find that landmarks have shifted or disappeared. Getting around can be trying, and people end up in different places than they intend.  My gosh, is there some kind of subtext here?

Mirroring this, the interconnected tales don’t quite cohere. For instance, Kammeston introduces and appraises the book, but a key event in later chapters is his own funeral. One character is described as having lived 250 years ago, and yet she is described as a lover of the artist Dryd Bathurst, who lived long enough to be interviewed by Kammeston, his biographer. Kammeston’s introduction claims that he has never left his native island, but later chapters contradict this.

A key event, narrated multiple times, is the death of a mime named Commis—  killed by a plate of glass which sliced down vertically from the loft of the theater where he was performing. Later we get an account that explains what that plate of glass was for, who left it too loosely attached, and why.  Later yet we learn that one of the suspects went by another name, one that by now we know.

In some unreliable narrator stories, the idea is to piece together the real truth behind the conflicting claims. Not here, I believe.  An in-world explanation is half-suggested: perhaps the indeterminacy which afflicts the physical world of the Archipelago affects the people too.  You return to a man or woman and they’re not the same person as before.  It’s hard to believe that the introduction from Kammeston refers to the same text we’re reading, and not just because of the funeral.  Or, probably more likely, Priest is just spitting on the notion of objectivity, as is common in mainstream lit. Real life is muddled, though it’s still rare (I think) for sf narratives to be also.

As conworlding, it’s brilliant and slapdash at the same time. There’s very little attempt to make this world different from Earth— in fact he could probably have set it on Earth making no substantial changes.  There are some sf elements, but little that affects the storytelling. The indeterminacy of the world has great thematic resonance but isn’t really taken seriously.  (E.g. it’s said that no map of the Archipelago is possible, and yet people do things like plot worldwide ocean currents, to say nothing of undertaking wars on the other side of the globe.)   And as mentioned, all the islands seem British, with a side order of Scandinavian.

Yet it has a real sense of local color— you do get a sense of these islands as distinct places, so that this is that rare thing, an sf world which feels like it has more than one culture.  Torm at one point has a neat insight about continents vs. islands:

[On the mainland] I felt instead the lure of distance, of places I could travel to and people I could meet without crossing a sea, and an endlessly unfolding world of certainty. Islands lacked that. Islands gave an underlying sense of circularity, of coast, a limit to what you could achieve or where you might go. You knew where you were but there was invariably a sense that there were other islands, other places to be.

It’s hard not to feel that he’s describing both Britain, and various sub-worlds within Britain. What he describes as the mainland attitude I recognize in Americans. We have regions, but they always feel like secondary things that you can ignore if you choose.

 

Would you like it? If what you really like could be described as “Larry Niven again”, then probably not.  But it doesn’t have the dry cold feeling of much experimental literature; rather, it’s warm, digressive, and passionately human. I liked it (far more than the Perec, in fact).

(FWIW I spent a couple of hours reading Priest’s blog. He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, with some judgments that seem more personal than reasoned. E.g. he likes Terry Pratchett and dislikes Charlie Stross, which doesn’t seem unconnected with being an old friend of Pratchett’s. He can be pretty amusing when he rips into Martin Amis, and spectacularly condescending when he offers advice to China Miéville. Fortunately this strain of Aggrieved Blogger doesn’t get into his book.)

 

 

 

Technology won’t alway suck

Here’s an interesting essay by Cory Doctorow: “The Internet Will Always Suck”.

His point is that “we always use our vital technologies at the edge of their capabilities.” The Internet sucked in 1995 because it could barely handle images; it sucks today because it can’t reliably deliver high-res movies to moving cellphones in remote areas.

1500 year old Roman comb

It’s an excellent point— as technology gets better and more ubiquitous, it’s stretched, and it’ll be used in non-optimal ways, with attendant errors and frustrations. Doctorow pointedly reminds designers to plan for those error conditions… don’t succumb to the engineer’s perennial optimism that things will work as they’re supposed to, or as they do in optimal conditions at the engineer’s desk.

It’s the always that goes too far, though. We’re living in a time of hair-raisingly fast technological development, but that is almost certainly just dumb luck and won’t continue in the same way. Will the Internet still be advancing in leaps and bounds in fifty years? Maybe. In five hundred years? Almost certainly not.

Technologies do mature, and settle down in usable, predictable forms. There’s probably an example in front of you: the QWERTY keyboard, first produced by Remington in 1878, still going strong a century and a half later despite its original purpose (preventing jams on the typewriter) being entirely moot today. It’s not the best design, but it’s stable, and thus allows people to transfer their knowledge between machines and even between technologies.

Automobiles have changed in all sorts of ways in a hundred years, but the user interface of the automobile is nearly unchanged in the last half century. Your grandfather could drive your car, with maybe 30 seconds’ instruction in how to use the automatic transmission (mainly learning not to use the nonexistent clutch). As Bill McKibben points out, you’d have trouble understanding how to make a meal in the typical kitchen of 1900— but that of 1950 would be no trouble.

Many tools have had roughly the same shape and function for hundreds of years or more. The illustration is exactly what it looks like, a comb— the idea of dragging an array of hard spikes through the hair has never been surpassed.

The obvious objection is that there is improvement in automobiles, guns, hammers, pianos, coffee makers, whatever. We don’t make combs out of antler anymore. Well, of course. But we change the user-facing portions the least, and every field doesn’t see the spectacular rate of change of electronics.

Computers are still in rapid development… though I’d note that programming hasn’t advanced anywhere near as fast as computers. You can write a program in Javascript today that’s remarkably similar to the Pascal of 1970. And even if computers stop changing, business hasn’t finished thinking up all the possibilities for transforming services and production.

It’s easy enough to imagine the process continuing for another fifty years. But five hundred? Five thousand? Even sf writers can’t make that convincing; they just mutter about “weakly godlike entities” and talk about something else instead.

I’ll venture a prediction: as soon as you can have sex with robots, we’ll be done. Less provocatively phrased: we’re now trying to stream megapixel movies on demand. Imagine a few more iterations of that: moving hi-res holograms; involvement of other senses; responses to the user’s position and movement. When we have a sensorium that mimics real life… where else is there to go? You essentially have Star Trek’s holodeck… or the capabilities of Second Life in real life. Once you can near-perfectly fool the human senses, that’s all you need to do; there’s little point in a fourfold increase in speed beyond that.  All the engineers will move over to genomics, in order to make furries a reality.

(Well, there’s one more requirement: your 3-d printer needs to be able to create a pizza. Then we’re done.)

 

Neptune’s Brood

Charles Stross is my favorite living sf author, so I was happy to finally get a copy of Neptune’s Brood. In fact I foolishly decided to finish it last night, so I ended up with four hours of sleep, countered by buckets of caffein.

It’s a sequel to Saturn’s Children, but set something like 4000 years later… which means it’s effectively a new creation. The characters are no longer androids but metahumans— the difference between machine and human has greatly eroded. The heroine, Krina, is made of metal and computers, but she breathes and eats and presumably excretes, she certainly has no problem with emotions, she can have sex, and though Stross has fun with the details of non-biological life, little in the plot depends on them (unlike the earlier book).

What the book turns out to be about is debt. It begins with a quote from David Graeber and this is not accidental. Stross talks about “fast money”, “medium money”, and “slow money”. Fast money is liquid cash and credit as we know it. Medium money is basically land and other long-term stores of value. Slow money is, well, even more long-term. It’s a currency designed an interstellar civilization that doesn’t have FTL. As transactions have to be confirmed by two interstellar banks, it’s very long-term, non-liquid, stable, and safe. Slow money is essentially an artifact of space colonization: the process is so expensive that a colony starts out in enormous debt, which can generally be paid off only in millennia— or by starting a colony of one’s own.

Krina is a banking historian, with a specialty in fraud. She moves to a system named Dojima (this is done by beaming her brain-state and downloading it into a new body) to do research and find out what happened to her missing sister, and almost immediately get caught up with a) a stalker trying to kill her, b) the Church of the Fragile, an organization dedicated to preserving biological humans, despite their comic in adaptation to modern life; c) an association of pirate underwriters. The last group is the most interesting… they do things like aggressively investigate insurance fraud, and audit cargos not to steal them but to do market interventions based on them. (Within a system, travel takes months but information travels in hours, so knowing what’s on a ship is valuable information.)

More details would either be spoilery or confusing. The plot is headlong and twisty. It all fits together pretty well, even if Krina is a bit more passive that the usual Stross protagonist.

As world building, it’s fantastic. Stross calls the book a “space opera”, which more or less means that he doesn’t want to be hassled if the science isn’t 100% plausible; but in fact there’s really nothing magical about his tech. He creates one exotic and fascinating environment after another, and Krina has to adapt to each one in turn. (At one point she become a mermaid. That might be a bit of a spoiler, but it’s on the damn cover.)

You can see why Stross is Paul Krugman’s favorite sf author: he takes problems of economics, money, and debt seriously. Krina, for instance, is instantiated as a slave— that is, she’s basically a clone of her mother, and forced to work for years to earn her freedom. This isn’t simply a bit of far-futuristic oomph; it’s actually straight Graeber, and relates to the main theme of the book: what debt does to people and societies.

I have a few quibbles, mostly related to narrative. It’s a long convention in first person novels that no one really explains why they’re writing out their story, but I think Krina is particularly messy here. She explains things that should be obvious in her world, she talks as if she’s researched her own story but doesn’t really give any metanarrative on why, the book changes to third person in a few spots, a few things are sometimes told in a weird order, as if Stross suddenly realized he needed to give some backstory to an event but didn’t feel like rewriting earlier bits.

Except in the Laundry novels, I think Stross has an ongoing problem making his antagonists smart enough. Of course we want the heroine to be smarter and later threats to be larger than earlier ones, but some of the antagonists here end up being just not very clever or dangerous.

It could be argued that Stross underestimates “Fragiles”— biological life— and overestimates how stable and durable metal and electronics are. Once you can play with genes like Javascript, who knows what limits biological transhumans have? But of course this isn’t a prediction of future development; it’s just a given of this universe that civilization has become non-biological, while (as systems do) retaining the traces of its origins.

But these aren’t biggies. It’s a fun book, it goes fast, and I wish there was a Volume Three…

 

Toliman ahoy!

One of the muses finally spoke– I’m not sure which Muse has the portfolio for science fiction.  Anyway, I suddenly have the plot for a new Incatena book.

Well, “plot” is too strong a word. “Predicament” maybe.

Morgan decides to quit the exciting but inconvenient life of an Agent, and on a whim decides to go back to Euko Teknik, in the α Centauri system, which is having a reunion for its alumni. The ex-Agent has changed sex (to whatever it wasn’t before) and had a half-mind-wipe in order to put diplomacy and espionage behind. But as we know, you can never really get away from the profession, especially in a spy novel. The boss activates some overrides in Morgan’s neurimplant. One more mission.

α Centauri, by the way, has the somewhat clunky traditional name Rigil Kentaurus. But it turns out to have the name Toliman too, and I’m considering using that. When you’re actually there, you probably don’t want to say “α Centauri A” every time you refer to the sun.

Anyway, the system contains two Incatena planets, Euko and Novorossiya, which have fought a few wars before. They have entirely different approaches and values. Euko is all about human or transhuman potential– they want to explore every possibility and rework humanity to match, and as  Euko has no native ecosphere they can rework the planet too. Novorossiya is into embracing our primate heritage, recreating the ancestral environment in the planet’s mixed alien/earthly ecosphere, and keeping a small technological footprint. (With Incatena technology, you can make your planet look like a jungle if you want– neurimplants are invisible and the high-tech infrastructure is only visible when you need a piece of it.)

But they each have their own planet, so it was not obvious how to get them into a major conflict. Finally I thought of something: The α Centauri is a double system (triple with Proxima, but it’s very far away), and orbits within it may not be stable indefinitely. So let’s say the system is getting unstable– perhaps a passing brown dwarf has destabilized it… only it turns out neither planet wants to take action to fix it. Thus Morgan’s interrupted retirement.

Now, I haven’t actually written a word yet, and it’s in line after a couple of other books anyway, so the two or three of you who’ve read APAF will have to wait a bit. But at least now I have a situation and not just a setting…

 

Cyranoid society

First, read this neat article on “cyranoids”.  The semi-stupid name is based on the play Cyrano de Bergerac; the title character provides the words to woo a woman, Roxane, on behalf of an inarticulate friend. This does not work out well.

(Linguistic note: Roxane is one of the few names we borrow from Ancient Persian; Rokhsāna was the Persian wife of Alexander the Great.)

In the contemporary experiment, it works great. Subjects are introduced to a 12-year-old boy and encouraged to talk to him; in fact all his words are provided by a 37-year-old professor via a radio receiver in his ear.  People didn’t suspect, despite the boy’s evident deep knowledge of European politics and Dostoevsky.  The reverse substitution– the professor being given lines by the 12-year-old– worked just as well.

This is mildly surprising, but as the article notes, we didn’t evolve in a situation where people are being remote-controlled by someone else.

If you want to make a billion dollars, my advice is, monetize this. My prediction is that in a hundred years, or perhaps in the Incatena, this will be commonplace.  Some easy applications:

• Learning seduction, as in the play. Or salesmanship, or politics, or law– anything that requires verbal eloquence and social skills.
• Teaching: channel a better teacher, or call on one when you’re stumped.
• Politics: respond to challenges better than you could with your own brain. Never make gaffes or forget someone’s name!
• Business deals or ambassadorships: send a human for the face-to-face interaction; control them from the head office during the hard negotiations.
• Real-life avataring: try out life in a different race or gender.
• Acting: never forget your lines!
• Interviewing: send out someone handsomer / prettier (or who merely lives in the area).
• Confrontations: get expert words when you need to stand up to someone who stresses you out.
• Police or detective work, or journalism: do routine in-person investigations without people recognizing your face or voice.
• Management: micromanage your employees’ very words!
• Sex: imagine the possibilities for role-playing or dominance. Also a nice loophole: swap spouses without physically doing so.

The obvious difficulty is the pause while the avatar receives the other person’s instructions. The Wired article isn’t clear on how this was handled, but there are ways to stall for time imperceptibly; also, perhaps, the controller could go phrase-by-phrase instead of sentence-by-sentence. Possibly, with practice, the avatar could acquire the simultaneous translator’s ability to listen and speak at the same time.

The avatar also needs the acting ability needed to bring someone else’s words to life. However, this is a lot easier if you’ve just heard someone saying the words in your ear– it’s far easier than trying to bring a written text to life. (Still, there are people who can hear something and just can’t reproduce the intonation… I recall my high school drama teacher trying to coach a wooden student actor; it was excruciating.)

Would people feel alienated and suspicious if they knew that the people they talk to might be using such services? I don’t think so, any more than we’re weirded out by the fact that small metal devices issue out human-sounding words. If anything, people would probably be surprised if someone– a politician or an interviewee– turned out not to be using an expert in their ear.

More interestingly, it might be that people retreat a bit from our present-day absolute individualism. In ancient times, or in certain other cultures, it was assumed that gods or demons might speak inside your head. (The Romans believed that a spirit called a “genius” dictated ideas to people; we’ve kept the world but absorbed the spirit as part of our notion of the self.) Maybe in such a world, the idea that you had to come up with your own words to speak would seem as strangely burdensome as thinking that everyone had to cook their own meals.

Edit: A Twitter conversation pointed out that I may not have communicated that the idea is kinda creepy. And it is! But then, cel phones can be kinda creepy too (as you may notice if you try to have a RL conversation with someone who can’t keep messing with theirs). I suspect if the option was available, though, it’d be used in some of the ways described above.