“It’s 100 percent that this technology will end up inside of us.

“I think bodily implants that cure cancer would go a long way to making people feel more comfortable about technology in their bodies,” he says. These won’t be the first technological implants to become commonplace, but they’ll be one of them. Istvan is confident that once technology allows for it (and once we get over the gross-out factor), humans will have universal translator devices implanted inside of them. “Technology that facilitates such understanding will cause globalization to occur faster. “Understanding everything everywhere we go would be fantastic, like the entire world having the same currency,” he says. As you might expect, he’s way on board with universal translation ear implants. Socioeconomic factors certainly play important roles in life, but as a transhumanist, Istvan specifically identifies technology as the single most important factor affecting human ability and quality of life.

Zoltan Istvan, who ran for President in the last election cycle, caused a media stir by building his political campaign entirely on transhumanism. As cross-language understanding becomes more commonplace (and ultimately boring and expected), how will it reshape the way the world works? While these women’s responses range from flattery to horror, it’s a compelling proof of concept: technology is beginning to show demonstrable wear on the language barrier. Enjoy this misogynistic field test of an automatic conversation translator, in which a dapper Englishman, replete with a spy cam, chases and kisses Japanese women an entire language away. One of them is a device called Ili, and if it works as demonstrated in the video below, it’s quite remarkable. Such techno-magical Babel fish are already in the works today. It’s fraught territory, but if technology has demonstrated anything over time, it has demonstrated its inevitability. If we can’t solve automatic text translation, how will we ever do so for spoken conversation? Furthermore, as translation technologies improve, how will we ever account for glaring differences (perhaps even clashes) of linguistic norms and culture? On a long enough timeline, those with a transhumanist bent say we’ll have electronic Babel fish of our own permanently implanted in our bodies.īut how realistic is it to suggest that technology can offer universal comprehension as a service? We’ve all used Google Translate to turn a foreign web page into a mostly readable piece of text, notwithstanding the glaring errors and nonsensical phrases that pop up along the way. This is a living creature from Douglas Adams’ classic sci-fi comedy romp that, when shoved into your ear canal, listens to everything around you and whispers a perfect translation to you in your native language. “For these people to have access to even poor translation tools in low-resource languages - ones for which there isn’t a lot of data available to create translation tools - could immediately improve the efficiency of such relief efforts, saving thousands of lives as a result.”įuturist ideas suggest we’ll see nothing less than a technological facsimile of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “Humanitarian relief efforts are often executed by enlisted soldiers who have neither the time nor the resources to learn the language of where they are assigned to provide relief,” he says. candidate at Georgetown University, endorses such language technology as a force for good, and it’s not just because he recently had to find the bathroom while visiting Beijing as a novice Mandarin speaker. Translate meet communication apps like Skype and Telegram, the world shrinks in the best way.ĭan Simonson, a computational linguist and Ph.D. When language tools like Google Translate and Yandex. Furthermore, we can do so in their own languages without even a single credit hour of exploratory language class. Technology has advanced such that we can instantaneously communicate with people in the farthest reaches of the world without breaking a sweat. People can save lives when they speak the same language.

Yandex translate bot telegram