[Carlhole]

IBM Strives For Superhuman Speech Technology

This could be a feature in cell phones in 4-5 years. The equipment would translate from, say, Mandarin to English and vice-versa on-the-fly and rapidly enough to allow normal conversation between two dissimilar speakers.

It's been remarked upon by many philosophers that language forms the basis of human thought. The question that has been lurking in the back of my mind for several years now is, if some form of machine consciousness/electronic conceptualization (or however you want to think of it) actually comes into being in the next few decades, who in the f**k needs 6 or 10 billion people (who can't do shit, by comparison)?

To say nothing of petroleum scarcity...

[elroy]

It would be like one of those things from Star Trek. Or like a Babelfish. Totally awesome!
*poof of logic*