Are Languages Finished?

This will be a short post — I guess part of a little mini-series with the ‘cities’ piece about how technology is transforming our lives. This one is kind of an obvious point on a trend that is already underway, not theoretical, but I haven’t really seen it discussed.

The point is that, with AI, separate languages are in a key sense ceasing to exist, that there is a universal language, which is the bland translation of the AI tools.

AI translation — which really was the forefront of the LLM revolution — is significant in two very different ways. One is that it vastly disincentivizes the learning of new languages. I feel it in my own life — at the point when communication actually has to happen, the thing to do is to stop being cute and to just pull out Google Translate — and given what American foreign language learning has been like I can only imagine the effect AI has on the motivation of high school students to focus on their French and Spanish classes. I have the sense that we’re about to have a jump in the physical technology — cell phones already feel a bit primitive (they hurt your wrist when you hold them too long!) and the technology may soon be there not only to scan a foreign menu in your own language without having to pull out a phone but also for people to have whole conversations with one another, each speaking in their own language, and a device doing the simultaneous translation for their interlocutor, as if we were all living in a UN summit. There’s not much to criticize in this development — the technology really is bringing people closer to one another and reducing a major barrier to understanding — but it does skip a crucial step, which is the painstaking process of learning a foreign language. As this shift happens, the mode of being international isn’t cosmopolitanism — spending a formative year abroad, applying oneself to your language classes, getting interested in foreign cultures, that sort of thing — but simply the technology building a bridge, allowing everybody to be pretty much exactly themselves but with a bit more wingspan, a bit more ability to interact with foreigners and foreign cultures.

The other significance of AI languages is a bit more subtle but maybe even more far-reaching. It reduces the need for an international intermediary language, which in this case means cutting at the reach of English. This is the thing that I haven’t really seen remarked on, but, living in a foreign country, I feel it in my daily life. Young adults grew up as anglophiles — for them, the English language was the ticket to the wider world and much of the international content they were consuming was in the original, so that the real motivators to learn the English language was pop songs and TV shows. But for kids, it’s different. They are still consuming English-language content but so much of it now is dubbed that there’s far less scope for early English-language acquisition. AI provides the capacity to dub everything, and then as people get older they will have the same tendency that the American kids do, to just use AI translation tools as a shortcut to learning a whole foreign language.

That’s maybe not a tragedy for the world — it’s not entirely clear that the best use of everybody’s childhood is to learn the lyrics of the Real Slim Shady in the original — but it is significant for American soft power, which rests largely on language and the goodwill from so much of the rest of the world having dedicated its childhood to consuming American pop music and TV shows. I don’t exactly know what happens next and whatever it is likely won’t be a neat trend line from the current technology. It’s too smooth to imagine that a decrease in English as an international language leads to emergent nationalisms, although it’s an interesting phenomenon when you’re traveling now how divisions seem to occur most of all in the domains of advanced technologies — different countries, China and Russia most obviously, producing their own banking and technological systems, so that there are can be hard stops to the flow of culture and trade in nationally-imposed infrastructure — but if AI vastly disincentivizes against the need to learn English, it’s safe to assume that there will be a certain tightening of affinities among speakers of a particular language even as the prevalence of the AI tools and of mass media and social media generates a demotic internationalism that runs through the technology and doesn’t particularly have a cosmopolitan connotation.

That’s what I’ve got! I don’t know how these trends play out, but it’s clear that something significant is happening: on the one hand, there’s a technological crossing of language barriers without eliminating the hold of one’s native language, which would suggest a continued hold of language-based nationalism even as barriers to communication are essentially eradicated; and then, on the other hand, the middleman of an international language is largely eliminated, which would generate one of many ironies of the AI boom, if Silicon Valley succeeded in rendering English, or at least its pride of place internationally, obsolete.