Thirty years old and still thought provoking
The always fascinating Arthur C. Clarke, from 1976, writing on the 100th anniversary of the telephone:
"For man is the communicating animal; he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food -- even without water! -- than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it. (Don't worry -- I won't try.)"
"So any major advances in communications capability comes into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable Often sooner; the public can't wait for 'state of the art' to settle down. . ."
"In the early 1940's the late John W. Cambell . . . refused to believe that anything as complex as a TV receiver could ever be made cheap and reliable enough for domestic use."
"Public demand certainly disposed of that prophecy. Home TV became available . . . before the solid state revolution [L]et us take it as axiomatic that complexity is no bar to universality. Think of your pocket computers again and march fearlessly into the future . . . trying to imagine the ideal, ultimate communications system -- the one that would fufill all possible fantasies."
"[W]hat about telepathy? Well, I don't believe in telepathy -- but I don't disbelieve it either. Certainly some sort of electronically assisted mental linkage seems plausible; in fact, this has already been achieved in crude form, between men and computers, through monitoring of brain waves. However, I find that my mental processes are so incoherent that I should be very sorry for anyone at the receiving end. Our superhuman successors, if any, might be able to cope; indeed, the development of the right technology might force such an evolutionary advance."
"Perhaps the best that we could manage would be sharing of emotional states, not the higher intellectual processes."
Clarke's point in this last paragraph is that we may be able to communicate anger, joy, or difficulty, without being able to specify what experience or thought we are having to produce those states. In other words, I might communicate the idea of happiness without being able to say what I am happy about. More on this later.
Arthur C. Clarke, writing in the article "Communications in the Next Century of the Telephone." It is in this book, The Telephone's First Century -- and Beyond: Essays on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Telephone Communications by Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Dertouzos, Morris Halle, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Jerome B. Wiesner T.Y. Crowe, ed. Crowell, with AT&T New York (1977) p.100 ISBN #: 0690014856