26 June

One of the most astonishing things that AI has already done, that nobody is really talking about. It has given us real-time instant translation between languages. And not just word-for-word translation. It captures intent, humour, sarcasm, politeness, hesitation, emotion, idioms and implied meaning. Accents don’t bother it. It will automatically remove disfluencies from speech, like ‘um’. And it can even replicate your exact voice, so that the translation is spoken in your voice. With AI, there’s no need to ‘assimilate’ people any more with a single language. There’s no need for any universal language at all. Every culture, every tiny regional dialect even, can continue to speak their own language and be instantly translated into any other language or dialect. AI is single-handedly removing the status hierarchy between languages and cultures. It may save many of them from extinction. As always, engineering is ignoring politics and making it irrelevant. We’re living in a time of wonders. Hidden by social media slop.