B-List Holy Grail Contest Winners
In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more instances.
The entries were fantastic and after a long and occasionally contentious dinner-meeting with my gracious panel of judges, it’s time to announce the results. I’d like to thank Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics and Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child for their time and insight.
Beyond the winners presented here, there were 8 short-list finalists. Rather than cram them all into a single long post that no one reads, I’ll be featuring each of the others separately over the coming weeks, along with commentary by the judges.
On to the winners.
Diversity prize: Weather Control
WEATHER CONTROL In 1845, it was suggested that a continental meridian of fire-six hundred miles of prairie burning from North to South-could settle weather over the eastern half of the continent. A few years later, Congress considered ordering a great dike built athwart the Gulf Stream in order to gentle seaboard climes. The twentieth century brought cloud-seeding cannon-used most recently in China, where the Army fired silver iodide into clouds during the 2008 Olympics. As holy grails go, this may be the supremely ironic one: while we cannot control the weather, our influence over the climate may be our downfall.
Matthew Battles is the coeditor of hilobrow.com who writes about language, literature, and technology for a variety of publications in print and online.
Ryan:
Really loved this one, and the parallel between wanting to control the weather and ending up with the climate change we’ve got today. I still hope that, one day, I’ll be able to say how it’s too bad the Post Office isn’t a efficient as the Weather Service.
Tim:
A lot of science fiction cautionary tales are about how attempts to build a controlling technology backfire and we are overwhelmed by the very thing we sought to master: I’m thinking of killer robots, Jurassic Park, and so on. In the science fiction version of the weather control story, those six hundred miles of prairie fire interact with the great dike resulting in thousands of tornados and permanent drought. As Matthew points out, the real story is much more terrifying.
Poster Child:
Further Irony: We are actually seeding clouds 24/7 as a by-product of air travel. If air travel by jet stops as a result of dwindling jet fuel - losing all that artificial man-made cloud cover may further exacerbate our climate woes.
Grand Prize: Voice Recognition
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Written by Robert Ewing of Laughing at Nothing, a group of filmmakers so vagrant that they don’t even have a website right now.
Poster Child:
This is so well written- If only my 5th grade teacher could be as accepting as I am of the absurdist styles of an essay written via voice recognition software, I’d be a much happier 5th grader. I was so sure that we have this sorted by the time I was an adult, but I’m still waiting.
Ryan:
Okay, I was the dissenting voice here, mainly because I’ve got a degree in Computational Linguistics, so I am just TOO CLOSE to the problem. The entry was really well-crafted, and the point that voice recognition isn’t really there yet is a good one! But I think it’s a little unfair because voice recognition is a new technology, and nobody is pointing to it and saying “There! FINISHED.” It’s young, it’s new, and there’s still lots of challenges left to overcome before we’ll be able to chat up our robot palls.
But then the other judges told me the entry was awesome and I was making excuses for the entire field and I thought, okay, maybe, but let’s see you analyze waveforms to statistically find word-boundaries, and then use n-gram processing to figure out the most likely series of words, using that predicatively on the candidate word form currently being processed.
And then I was like, man, I’m a cartoonist now.
Anyway, a great entry!
Tim:
As you can tell, there was some controversy over the selection of this entry. Ryan wanted to argue that the tech isn’t there yet but Dragon Naturally Speaking is at version 10 and many companies have used voice-control in their phone labyrinths for years. For a technology that Ryan wants to say is not ready for primetime it sure is widely available commercially. This is what makes it so disappointing. The tech is plainly not done, but there’s a group of people with order forms saying “There! FINISHED,” ready to take your money.
Leaving aside the squabbles of the panel, for me what put this entry over the top was the sheer excellence of the “show, don’t tell” writing.
Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.