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Misleading clickbait title: "the AI revolution" is doing nothing to languages. It just reflects the current state of languages. How is that a problem?

mc32 2y ago
I don’t either. It’s like saying there are more smaller rocks than bigger rocks and concluding there’s something wrong with geology. You can’t count all languages and then divide by total population and say that the dividend is the proper amount of speakers every language should have. It’s idiotic. It’s like saying we should have equal outcomes in a given society (pick homogenous S Korea for example) and saying there should be equal outcomes despite a bell distribution. It flies in the face of reality. Some people are more apt, some people are lazy, some just lack ability for what they choose despite all efforts. It's not to say we should avoid unfairness --but the saying we should have equal outcomes is silly.
- GolfPopper 2y ago
  >Some people are more apt, some people are lazy, some just lack ability for what they choose despite all efforts. Perhaps it is just chance that your examples all involve peoples' internal characteristics, but it is a great mistake to eliminate external factors. An energetic, motivated genius born to disease and starvation-level poverty is extremely unlikely to experience the success that a lazy idiot born to great wealth and privilege will. It's like claiming that how far rocks go when they fall off the mountain depends entirely on how big they are, and that where they came from on the mountain doesn't matter.
  - mc32 2y ago
    So you're saying what they really mean is finding the the disadvantaged in the upper tail of a normal distribution and giving them an equal footing, not result, but footing. I think _most_ people will agree with that, except we do see some people who for unknown, well we know, but anyway, want to disband and tear down schools for gifted kids and similar programs. I'm afraid it's a disguised version of the anti-intellectualist nature of some people. They don't want education, they don't want success. They want an easy life doing little, maybe a YouTube personality, maybe an influencer, maybe a social activist without having to study much, but I want things to go my way, because. Beck and Foreman, are examples of people, who as kids had absolutely nothing, but succeeded.
flanked-evergl 2y ago
I can't help but suspect that what they want is an end to technological progress, or possibly even a return to a pre-technological/industrial civilization.
- dartos 2y ago
  What makes you think that?
  - smitty1e 2y ago
    The Environmentalist effort to demonize carbon (present in pretty much every molecule of ever cell of every body) as some kind of pollutant, and shut down coal plants at the same time AI is seemingly sucking all the 'trons does lend a certain dystopian vibe to the conversation. Wiser use of resources is a great conversation to have, but so is a balance of priorities and a less authoritarian approach to consensus-building.
  - flanked-evergl 2y ago
    "The ${technological development} Is Crushing ${thing that is unaffected by the technological development}" The AI revolution is not doing a damned thing to languages. Resources are finite, technology makes them more abundant, the more resources we have, the easier it is to spend more resources on doing things like maintaining endangered languages. By any reasonable measure, people who care about maintaining endangered languages should be ecstatic about every development that makes resources more abundant, but they are never, which makes me doubt that they care about the endangered languages. It's really the same with nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides a solution we can use today to solve our carbon emission problem, but nuclear energy allows technological development to continue apace, which is why groups like Extinction Rebellion would rather vandalize art and economic activity than advocate for nuclear energy.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  just cuz it's technology doesn't mean it's progress
lolinder 2y ago
Reflects is a good word. Generative AI only works for the most popular languages on the internet, and due to its use cases it reflects those languages back into the internet. This creates a feedback loop that amplifies the popularity of the most popular languages at the expense of the ones that are already more marginal. Yes, it's continuation of the same pattern we've been seeing for decades, but I think it's fair to say that generative AI will escalate that pattern dramatically unless specifically addressed. > How is that a problem? Setting aside my aesthetic enjoyment of the wide variety of languages that exist in the world, there's a strictly utilitarian argument to be made that placing the majority of the world's population in the status of second-class citizen (having to perpetually conduct all business in a language other than their native tongue) is not the best way to serve humanity as a whole.
- Galatians4_16 2y ago
  So band together, make a list, and use those languages? Seems solvable enough to me.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yes, it's solvable! Step one is to identify the problem, though, which is what this article is doing.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > ... my aesthetic enjoyment ... Without asserting that English would be a good choice of global language; this seems like a terrible reason to silo huge chunks of humanity from each other. There is an extremely good argument that we should all standardise on Mandarin Chinese with a better alphabet to promote good international communication. We're in an era where nuclear-armed powers are fighting each other again. Unclear international communication could literally get us all killed. The aesthetics of everyone having their own lingo is not worth the risk.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > this seems like a terrible reason to silo huge chunks of humanity from each other That's why I set that argument aside.
coffeebeqn 2y ago
I was positively surprised by how fluent the current models are in my small language (<10M speakers). An order of magnitude better than any non-LLM translation software. With a larger corpus in small languages in the training they will be very well supported

mc32 2y ago

I don’t either. It’s like saying there are more smaller rocks than bigger rocks and concluding there’s something wrong with geology. You can’t count all languages and then divide by total population and say that the dividend is the proper amount of speakers every language should have. It’s idiotic. It’s like saying we should have equal outcomes in a given society (pick homogenous S Korea for example) and saying there should be equal outcomes despite a bell distribution. It flies in the face of reality. Some people are more apt, some people are lazy, some just lack ability for what they choose despite all efforts. It's not to say we should avoid unfairness --but the saying we should have equal outcomes is silly.

GolfPopper 2y ago
>Some people are more apt, some people are lazy, some just lack ability for what they choose despite all efforts. Perhaps it is just chance that your examples all involve peoples' internal characteristics, but it is a great mistake to eliminate external factors. An energetic, motivated genius born to disease and starvation-level poverty is extremely unlikely to experience the success that a lazy idiot born to great wealth and privilege will. It's like claiming that how far rocks go when they fall off the mountain depends entirely on how big they are, and that where they came from on the mountain doesn't matter.
- mc32 2y ago
  So you're saying what they really mean is finding the the disadvantaged in the upper tail of a normal distribution and giving them an equal footing, not result, but footing. I think _most_ people will agree with that, except we do see some people who for unknown, well we know, but anyway, want to disband and tear down schools for gifted kids and similar programs. I'm afraid it's a disguised version of the anti-intellectualist nature of some people. They don't want education, they don't want success. They want an easy life doing little, maybe a YouTube personality, maybe an influencer, maybe a social activist without having to study much, but I want things to go my way, because. Beck and Foreman, are examples of people, who as kids had absolutely nothing, but succeeded.

flanked-evergl 2y ago

I can't help but suspect that what they want is an end to technological progress, or possibly even a return to a pre-technological/industrial civilization.

dartos 2y ago
What makes you think that?
- smitty1e 2y ago
  The Environmentalist effort to demonize carbon (present in pretty much every molecule of ever cell of every body) as some kind of pollutant, and shut down coal plants at the same time AI is seemingly sucking all the 'trons does lend a certain dystopian vibe to the conversation. Wiser use of resources is a great conversation to have, but so is a balance of priorities and a less authoritarian approach to consensus-building.
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  "The ${technological development} Is Crushing ${thing that is unaffected by the technological development}" The AI revolution is not doing a damned thing to languages. Resources are finite, technology makes them more abundant, the more resources we have, the easier it is to spend more resources on doing things like maintaining endangered languages. By any reasonable measure, people who care about maintaining endangered languages should be ecstatic about every development that makes resources more abundant, but they are never, which makes me doubt that they care about the endangered languages. It's really the same with nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides a solution we can use today to solve our carbon emission problem, but nuclear energy allows technological development to continue apace, which is why groups like Extinction Rebellion would rather vandalize art and economic activity than advocate for nuclear energy.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
just cuz it's technology doesn't mean it's progress

lolinder 2y ago

Reflects is a good word. Generative AI only works for the most popular languages on the internet, and due to its use cases it reflects those languages back into the internet. This creates a feedback loop that amplifies the popularity of the most popular languages at the expense of the ones that are already more marginal. Yes, it's continuation of the same pattern we've been seeing for decades, but I think it's fair to say that generative AI will escalate that pattern dramatically unless specifically addressed. > How is that a problem? Setting aside my aesthetic enjoyment of the wide variety of languages that exist in the world, there's a strictly utilitarian argument to be made that placing the majority of the world's population in the status of second-class citizen (having to perpetually conduct all business in a language other than their native tongue) is not the best way to serve humanity as a whole.

Galatians4_16 2y ago
So band together, make a list, and use those languages? Seems solvable enough to me.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yes, it's solvable! Step one is to identify the problem, though, which is what this article is doing.
roenxi 2y ago
> ... my aesthetic enjoyment ... Without asserting that English would be a good choice of global language; this seems like a terrible reason to silo huge chunks of humanity from each other. There is an extremely good argument that we should all standardise on Mandarin Chinese with a better alphabet to promote good international communication. We're in an era where nuclear-armed powers are fighting each other again. Unclear international communication could literally get us all killed. The aesthetics of everyone having their own lingo is not worth the risk.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > this seems like a terrible reason to silo huge chunks of humanity from each other That's why I set that argument aside.

coffeebeqn 2y ago

I was positively surprised by how fluent the current models are in my small language (<10M speakers). An order of magnitude better than any non-LLM translation software. With a larger corpus in small languages in the training they will be very well supported