I was at a CVS in NYC recently, and witness a small kerfuffle. Near the entrance, a woman was about to leave, while at the same time a man had just entered.
One of the CVS employees manning a register called loudly across the store “Hey you!” Both the man and the woman turned to look.
The man looked startled. I think he thought he was about to be accused of shoplifting. “Are you talking to me?” he asked.
“No,” the employee shouted, “I’m talking to her.”
It turned out that the woman had accidentally left something at the counter. The woman retrieved the thing she had forgotten, while the man looked visibly relieved.
When this encounter happened, I thought to myself that no confusion would have occurred if everyone had had the right tools.
Suppose, as a thought excperiment, all three people were wearing blended reality glasses, networked together.
The employee could have used some kind of future interface to point to the woman, not the man. Both the man and the woman, and everyone else, would have immediately understood to whom he was speaking.
At the same time, this future scenario, and the possible ways that it could be implemented, raises some very interesting questions.
More tomorrow.
I just learned that kerfuffle is a word, how fantastic! Sounds to me like something out of Douglas Adams’s “The meaning of liff”. And according to Merriam-Webster, “there is some kerfuffle among language historians over how the altered spelling came to be favored”. 🙂 But I digress …