288 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

288 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Most scientists believe communication between humans is classical: words spoken in proximity have no more power than had we carefully written out what we wanted to say. Body language and tone of voice are simply useful tools to aid the transmission of this information. I’m going to explore the ways in which human face-to-face communication might exceed this traditional classical model. Let us look first at the bandwidth of communication between people. Bandwidth Let me give you a mental picture for what I mean by bandwidth. Imagine Iam sitting in a darkened theatre enjoying one of my favorite comedians at the Edinburgh Festival — the biggest arts festival in the world. I phone a friend who is also a fan and let them listen in. Perhaps I even use the camera and surreptitiously point the phone at the comedian. My live experience is digitized, compressed and transmitted over the mobile network to my friend. He gets the same experience but at much-reduced bandwidth. My friend has a similar but qualitatively different experience to mine. He cannot hear the degrees of loud and soft I hear, nor the full range of high and low frequencies forming the timbre of the comedian’s voice; no sense of the smell of old armchairs or the heat of the audience around me. He is spared the strange stickiness my shoes meet on the floor of the auditorium and the occasional slosh of beer that hits me froma slightly inebriated neighbor. For the person at the other end of the phone, their view is of a tiny two-dimensional screen about 4 by 3 inches square. Of course, they can enlarge the picture, but then the pixilation dominates and it looks like an impressionist picture viewed close up. He has nothing like the same intensity of experience. Loss of bandwidth is something we can study mathematically and the reduction is enormous. Video and Audio The image of the comedy show is digitized by the camera and microphone; the video at 384,000 bits per second and the audio at 64,000 bps. Mathematical compression will be applied and the video will shrink to 30,000 while the audio drops down to 4,700. After compression, the whole experience amounts to around 40,000 bits per second. To put it in some perspective, a DVD would be 11.5 million bits per second, nearly 300 times the bandwidth. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015978