Re:The first appearance of a real computer in a comic book
by myself248 on Saturday September 26, 2020 @03:34PM
(#24601521)
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage
Re:The first appearance of a real computer in a comic book
by mechagodzilla on Saturday September 26, 2020 @07:29PM
(#24602960)
In their defense, that's a great way to filter out snake oil salesmen that would happily take your money and promise you a machine that will give you the right answer no matter what.
Re:The first appearance of a real computer in a comic book
by 082349872349872 on Saturday September 26, 2020 @01:15PM
(#24600424)
In the future, being multilingual will be useful not so much for communicating with other humans, but for getting different answers from voice assistants.
Hey Google, who owns Hans Island?
Hej Google, hvem ejer Hans Ø?
The most important aspect in the early sci-fi visions of computers was that you could trust the answer the computer gives you. Futuristic sci-fi computers were, and are, DWIM[0] - they understand what you're asking for, and give back as accurate and relevant answer as possible. This is in stark contrast to real-world search engines and voice assistants of today: sure, they can tell you a lot of things, but half the time they can't parse your query correctly, and the results depend less on their accuracy, and more on who paid more to get their stuff in front of people (relevant or not). Second-guessing and sanity-checking answers are a standard part of our interactions with query-based interfaces. So we have a lot to go to match even cheesy robots from pulp comic books.
But we sure as hell nailed the glitter.
--
[0] - Do What I Mean.