Future
The ever-growing processing power of modern computers is used to present the user with an interface that requires minimal computer skills to operate. Modern software often utilizes buttons, icons and elaborate pictographic interfaces to try to achieve a high level of usability. Most of the time people use computers, they do not realize that they are doing so. (Examples: ATMs, car navigation systems, mobile phones, microwave ovens...)
One of the major goals in computer engineering is the construction of a natural language interface, possibly with speech recognition, body language recognition and automatic visualisation. This would eliminate the need for computer literacy in everyday work and life in areas where such machines are available. An example of a futuristic Natural Language Interface can be found throughout the Star Trek series, where characters simply tell the computer what they want using ordinary English.
Read more about this topic: Computer Literacy
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“We accept and welcome ... as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”
—Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
“To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
““Dark times” is what they call it in Norway when the sun remains below the horizon all day long: the temperature falls slowly but surely at such times.—A nice metaphor for all those thinkers for whom the sun of mankind’s future has temporarily disappeared.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)