Language Will Be Solved

Language translation is almost a solved problem. We will soon communicate effortlessly with anyone, regardless the language.

I played 30 games of Connect Four at our last Airbnb. It was one of those oversized outdoor versions, and we got competitive because I said no one could beat me. That got everyone playing, and I was quickly defeated.

My curiosity was piqued about whether it was possible to win every game, so I went to the web. The game has trillions of variables, and in the 1980s it was solved, meaning if you go first, you can win every time.

My prediction is that we are less than 10 years away from solving language translation and that it is just a puzzle or game that has a solution.

Right now we are in Switzerland, where citizens commonly speak several languages. But even with that, communication is still difficult for visitors. Many Swiss people over 60 do not speak English, especially in the smaller towns like the one we visited to meet some of my wife’s relatives.

We found her grandma’s cousin, who is 95 and the oldest man in the village of Recherswil. He is the last of the Kauffman’s living there and didn’t convert to Mormonism in 1905 and move to Utah like some of his family.

Natalie used Google Translate to ask questions and held the phone up for him to speak back in German Swiss. Surprisingly, we spent almost an hour with him, got a lot of stories, and saw a lot of remarkable memorabilia from his life and home.

Google Translate did remarkably well, and it is a modern wonder that we can speak back and forth into a device and converse like this. But anyone who has done this knows that it still isn’t a seamless conversation.

I am predicting that with AI, we will be able to converse with almost zero lag. I don’t know what the technology will look like yet, but it could be AirPods, and we put our phone on our forehead and hold it so the other person can read the words as we say them.

Whatever the technology is, we will effectively communicate in almost all languages within a few years. I don’t see language learning being very important in the future. I foresee us speaking the tongue that is best for communicating, and the technology does the rest. This will open up the ability to have rich conversations about topics that many of us currently can’t discuss with people who don’t speak the same language as us.

I can see five years from now, being in Japan and having the technology for teens to talk with each other in their own language, and it is all translated to the receiver's language instantly. This will probably happen online in chat and videos first. We will one day be able to tell jokes and even understand jokes in many languages, that will be proof that language is solved.

happy 4:20 folks

SP