🍄 The Future of Language

With the rise of robotics, Elon building BCI’s and big talk of AI-assisted universal speech, has the beauty of linguistics left the chat? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Nov 17, 2023

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Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. A universal language? Maybe in the Metaverse. Digital telepathy? There’s a brain chip for that. The emoji is picture perfect… or it’s time for a quick word?

“AI has some interesting potential: for example, to allow us to communicate with people whose language we don’t share,” writes linguist Tony Thorne, Director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London. “But I think the limitations of AI (its difficulties in interpreting or reproducing human nuance, implication, indirectness, etc) will lead to – is already leading to – new forms of incoherence and misunderstanding.”

If the correct use of language is doomed, then social media started it. “Slowly, MySpace gave way to Facebook and Twitter, via social gaming sites like NeoPets and Habbo Hotel. It was within this context of social interaction that “abbreviations like ‘lol’ and ‘wtf,’ emoticons like 🙂 and <3, and conventions like all caps for shouting came into being,” Jonny Thomson, author of Mini Big Ideas (Wildfire, 2023) and Mini Philosophy (Wildfire, 2021), writes for Big Think. “The internet is, in many ways, a Wild West of on-the-hoof rules and decentralized authority, but language still operates in the same way. New words or uses collide together through extensive ‘weak ties,’ and then usage will determine what sticks and what doesn’t.”

Linguists James and Lesley Milroy coined the terms “strong ties” (friends and relatives you see all the time) and “weak ties” (outsiders and strangers we speak to once in a while) in 1986. According to linguist Gretchen McCulloch in her book Because Internet, “The internet, then, makes language change faster because it leads to more weak ties… [and] you can get to know people who you never would have met otherwise,” writes Thomson. “With hashtags, viral videos, and “following” strangers, we are constantly rubbing up against people of different linguistic communities. Whereas before we would only occasionally meet or form these “weak ties,” now we’re swimming in a sea of linguistic foreigners and interlocutors.” And now with Grok, the “rebellious” chatbot by Musk’s xAI (and integrated into X), we may question the sarcasm of what is real or not…but that’s for another newsletter.

Caller on Lobe One

Computer-facilitated telepathy as the future of communication, who’d have thought it? Well, Elon Musk had that brainwave, and this year got the green light for his neurotech company Neuralink Corp. to start human trials of brain implants they’ve been developing since 2016. Musk boasts that his new technology will allow humans to achieve a state of “symbiosis” with AI. Initially, the neural implants—dubbed a Fitbit for the brain—are for medical use and “will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs,” according to Musk. The primary plan will see a robot surgically place a brain–computer interface [BCI] implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move. Then, Musk will move on with bold intentions of “curing” conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. Eventually, he sees brain-to-brain communication as a potential “universal language.”

“If successful, such neural implants would, ultimately, enable us to communicate directly with other human brains without needing to use language,” writes language expert, Vyvyan Evans Ph.D, for Psychology Today. Not so fast. “For direct brain-to-brain communication to be feasible, making language obsolete, then a neural implant would need to rely on a common or universal system or language of thought, shared by two brains,” continues Evans, who wrote The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats (Macmillan, 2017). “Just as two speakers of English can communicate with one another, while they cannot communicate with a speaker of, say, French or Chinese, then a neural implant would require an underlying system or “language” of thought, a system of concepts, that could be communicated directly from one brain to another, using digital telepathy.”

Connecting You Now

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, meanwhile, works on an AI-powered “universal speech translator” for the Metaverse – and everyone in the digital world. “The goal here is instantaneous speech-to-speech translation across all languages, even those that are mostly spoken; the ability to communicate with anyone in any language," said the Facebook founder. "That's a superpower that people dreamed of forever and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes.”

“You speak in the language of your choice and your interlocutor hears what you say in the language of their choice,” explains linguist Philip Seargeant, author of The Future of Language: How Technology, Politics and Utopianism are Transforming the Way We Communicate (Bloomsbury, 2023), for iai.tv. “Conversation in the metaverse would be like a perfectly dubbed film. Similar approaches are already being used by videoconferencing platforms, while out in the real world, the same capabilities are being built into earbuds which mediate between the foreign language you’re listening to and the familiar language you hear.”

But, it’s complicated. “In an era of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, the age-old dream of a universal language, contemplated by thinkers from Dante to Sylvia Pankhurst, has found a new and vibrant home,” writes Seargeant for iai.tv. “Yet far from fostering international harmony, real-time speech-to-speech translation tech risks tearing society apart.” He says that a universal language like this would instead “exacerbate inequality across the globe, privilege certain groups while marginalizing others, and ultimately pose a deadly threat to the cultural diversity that’s such a strength for our species.”

This dashes all romance from the utopian dream, which once proposed world peace, unity, and understanding. Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof constructed the universal language of Esperanto in 1887—based on Latin with German, Polish, and Russian influences— intending for it to become an international second language. “Zamenhof’s motivation for developing Esperanto came from his own experiences of growing up as a growing up as a Polish Jew on the outskirts of the Russian Empire where violent cultural and ethnic prejudice was rife,” writes Seargeant. “One of the reasons for all the conflict he saw around him, he believed, was that ‘difference of speech is a cause of antipathy, nay even of hatred, between people’. The aim of his language was to create a neutral form of communication—something which didn’t ‘belong’ to any one community or culture—which would help people recognise their shared humanity rather than obsess about their differences.”

Do You Speak English?

“English is the most spoken language in the whole world,” writes Tim Brinkhof for Big Think. “However, an estimated 80% of all written and verbal interactions take place between non-native speakers. Statistically, these non-native speakers will have a much greater impact on the way English is spoken than native speakers will.” How come? “David Deterding, a linguist affiliated with the Universiti Brunei Darussalam in Brunei, spent years studying how spoken English in Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Singapore differs from the U.S. and the UK.,” continues Brinkhof. “Due to phonetic differences between English and their native languages, many people from East Asia emphasize the “t” in words that start with a “th,” like “thing.” They also say “mebbe” instead of “maybe” and “pless” instead of “place.” In a future where the wealth and power of East Asia continues to grow, these “incorrect” pronunciations could well become the new standard.”

So, English is over?

“It’s possible English will not be around 1,000 years from now,” writes Brinkhof.
“…The prominence of a language is inextricably tied to the cultural, economic, and military might of the countries that speak it. When these countries withdraw from the international stage, so does their mode of expression.” So what next? “In previous decades, Mandarin — spoken by over one billion people — has been repeatedly identified as a strong contender despite its complexity. But as the Chinese economy slows down and foreign relations cool, experts are no longer sure.”

It Could Have Been An Emoji

Seargeant suggests that using emoji was the first sign of handing over the future of human interaction to machines. “Far from simply being an amusing set of colourful little symbols, emoji are in the front line of a revolution in the way we communicate,” he writes in his book, The Emoji Revolution: How technology is shaping the future of communication (Cambridge University Press, 2019). “As a form of global, image-based communication, they're a perfect example of the ingenuity and creativity at the heart of human interaction. But they're also a parable for the way that consumerism now permeates all parts of our daily existence, taking a controlling interest even in the language we use; and of how technology is becoming ever more entangled in our everyday lives.”

So, not all smiley face…

OMG LOL

“Thanks to new technologies like text messaging, simplification—or “erosion” as some linguists prefer to call it—is taking place at a faster pace than ever before,” writes Brinkhof. “Abbreviations like “LOL” or “OMG” are already being used as frequently if not more frequently than the phrases they abbreviate, namely “laughing out loud” and “oh my god.” And while “gonna” and “OMG” are currently not considered proper English, historical trends suggest their usage eventually will be recognized as correct rather than merely colloquial.”

Thorne, the former Director of the Language Centre at King’s College London, says one major change is the way that the distinction between written and spoken language has broken down since people began to type conversations and exchange rapid interactions electronically. “Pre-existing words and expressions are hijacked, reversed, toxified, appropriated and modified as never before,” he tells Dazed. “And we all now have the power to do this via electronic media – we don't need permission to publish our thoughts and indulge our playful, mischievous or creative new usages.”

Message in a Meme

“With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” Olivia Kan-Sperling, a writer who specializes in programming language critique, tells Dazed. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.”

Maybe they didn’t get the memo, because they’re not part of…

The Voiceprint

“Merleau-Ponty, as he was studying sensory experience, he began to find of ways of articulating things that are very close to the ways of speaking common to every indigenous oral culture the world over,” ecologist and philosopher David Abram told ALICE. “And these cultures are so different from one another–whether we speak of the Koyukon people of central Alaska, or the Pintupi Pinjarra of Australia, or the Sami people of northern Scandinavia. Or on this continent, the Hopi and the Lakota people of the plains, or the Navajo and the Hopi of the southwest desert, or the Waorani people of the Amazon, all of these cultures are so unique and different from one another and yet they have just a couple things utterly in common. They all assume from the get-go that everything is alive, everything is alive or animate in some sense, that each thing has its own active agency, that nothing is definitely inert or inanimate. And they all assume that everything speaks.”

“Human speech is just our part of this much vaster conversation that is always going on. Most of it not in words—but we have words. Birds have their whistles and their cries, and the wind in the willows is another kind of speech, the water crashing over the rocks another kind of speech. Everything speaks, every sound is an expressive voice.”—David Abram, ALICE interview.

What Else We Are Wondering…

🧠 The robots are coming... Could language save us? “Until robots understand jokes and sarcasm, artificial general intelligence will remain in the realm of science fiction, writes Daniel Lehewych for Big Think. “One major distinguishing feature of human communication is that the meaning of what we say often isn’t conveyed explicitly by the literal meaning of our sentences. Instead, the meaning of our words often goes beyond what we expressly assert.”

🧠 A different picture
Eons before emoji, there were Egyptian hieroglyphs and the earliest Elamite writing, that used a pictographic script, dating from the middle of the 3rd millennium. The Kanien'kéha [Mohawk] language—an Indigenous language in Canada spoken today by around 2,350 people—also first recorded words in pictographs (such as messages, stories and legends) long before writing came about. “The history of our people, events and treaties, were recorded on wampum belts which were used as an aid to memory or mnemonic device (recalling from memory) for official purposes,” writes First Voices, an online space for Indigenous communities to share and promote language, oral culture and linguistic history. “Special care was made in reading the wampum by holding the belt correctly. Each color used had a specific meaning.” Another example of mnemonic device is the condolence cane. The cane is used by the official speaker to help him recall names, how they are grouped by nation, and various translations which were recorded on the cane.

🧠 Sign of the times
Video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate, which is transforming American Sign Language, reports Amanda Morris in the New York Times. “There are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok — and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.”

🧠 Bilingual brainpower
Moldovan-U.S. linguist Viorica Marian spotlights the merits of speaking many languages in a new book, The Power of Language (Pelican Books/Penguin Random House, 2023). “If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help to improve its mileage, allowing it to go farther on the same amount of fuel,” writes Marian.

🧠 I could do it in my sleep
Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than previously thought, reports The BBC. "Basically, the message is that you are able to learn [words in other] languages during sleep, even new languages you never heard before, but you do it in a very different way than when you are awake," says Matthieu Koroma, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium.

🧠 Space and time
“It appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space,” write science journalists Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren, authors of the book, Are You Thinking Clearly. “The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it?” they write for the BBC. In their book they explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think—from genetics to digital technology and advertising.

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