Similar leaps are coming for voice, humanity’s primary form of communication. In the coming years, technology like Apple’s AirPods live translation will combine with tech like the latest voice mode of ChatGPT, which can speak in a manner that feels like a human being, to provide something close to Star Trek’s universal translator.
Of course, it’s far from an unequivocal good. Like any muscle, speaking a second language is a skill that atrophies if it’s not used (for now, X gives you the options to say which languages it should not interpret, but as this technology proliferates such technology will likely default to your native tongue more and more). And LLMs can be far from perfect, particularly in cultures like Japanese where the subject or object of a sentence is frequently dropped and assumed from context. X’s Grok, for now, confidently translates regardless, while a human might express some uncertainty.
COMMON UNDERSTANDING?
Just because we comprehend each other’s words, it doesn’t automatically follow that we share a common understanding. Translation of text cannot always explain irony, taboo, banter or trolling. There is no better time to recognise that than during the World Cup, as Americans and British, “two nations divided by a common language” as the line often attributed to George Bernard Shaw has it, talk past one another over the same sport. No amount of linguistic proficiency can change the fact that lots of Americans seemingly believe that if LeBron James or Tom Brady just took up football instead, they’d win the tournament.
Perhaps the biggest worry is this: Some modern scholars argue that the scattering of humanity in the Tower of Babel story was not a punishment but a blessing, bestowing on us cultural diversity and dispersing a monolithic empire. As the internet has proliferated, the world has become smaller, squashed into a monoculture. That might happen with our wit, too, as local differences, particularly smaller ones, give way to the largest languages and the references that travel most easily.
AI translation may blur some of that. But still, after thousands of years of failing to understand one another, getting the joke at all still feels something close to miraculous.