There’s a great scene in the movie Alien where Tom Skerritt’s character, Dallas, has a (somewhat eerie) conversation with the ship’s computer, named Mother. By conversation, I mean Dallas asks the computer questions and Mother responds with meaningful answers. Whenever I see it, I think of two things:
- I’m sure its not a mistake that, given the name of the computer, the room looks like a womb.
- One day, we will all interact with computers like this.
You may understand why I thought of this after you take a look at the introduction demo for the WolframAlpha Computational Knowledge Engine. Basically, its a combination of advanced search technology with “business intelligence” and, I must say, its very impressive. I won’t go further into it since the demo speaks for itself. Plus, there’s a write-up on it in the New York Times Online. Anyhow, WolframAlpha launches today and I highly recommend checking it out.
I have no doubt this stuff will be combined with speech technology, which in the corporate and consumer world is already starting to hit mainstream with products Microsoft Sync and the built-in auto-attendant functionality of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 / Office Communications Server 2007.
But I want to be clear that when this day comes, I will *not* be volunteering to crawl around air ducts with an improvised flame thrower. Not me.
