Even in the backwater field I'm in—second-language education—AI is creating thorny ethical problems. It has long been assumed that the only way to communicate a

Even in the backwater field I'm in—second-language education—AI is creating thorny ethical problems. It has long been assumed that the only way to communicate and cooperate across language barriers is for people to learn each other’s languages or to rely on human interpreters and translators who know more than one language. This need for bilingual ability is a major reason why, in many countries, children are required to study foreign languages in school. Now machine translation is starting to make it possible for some communication and cooperation to take place between people who are completely monolingual. So should children still be required to study foreign languages? Should international students be allowed to use MT when writing papers for university classes? Should university applicants be required to state whether or not they used MT (or GPT-3!) when preparing their admission essays? Compared to problems like surveillance and profiling, these issues are trivial. But the fact that they already exist, and the fact that the people involved—educators in this case—have barely begun trying to understand their implications, suggest to me that discussion of ethical issues surrounding AI is vitally important.