Blind Book

This would start as a telephone-based facebook for the blind community and then incorporate Amazon and Google- like features, but with an emphasis on real-time voice-to-voice communication. This system would allow people to talk individual-to-individual, one- to-many, or individual-to-the-system. Since this would be an open source project, hackers could develop a spoken audio language that would allow them to change "who they are talking to" and "what they are talking to them about", at the same time.

This was inspired by the book "Exploding the Phone" which is about hackers, many of them blind, who hacked both the AT&T routing system -- by whistling -- and the system of human operators -- by pretending to be people who they were not.

Since: 1. evolution seems to have built people -- first mouth, then nose, then eyes, then ears, and ears process less data but use the brain more like a database, and 2. we inherited a mostly-spoken, audio language which was the solution to millions of years of experimentation; then maybe we should be preparing for computers to go the same way, rather than preparing for them to become the hyper-visual super tv's that they seem to be becoming.