Will language face a dystopian future? How 'Future of Language' author Philip Seargeant thinks AI will shape our communication

Technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive texting and autocomplete are already transforming language as we know it.

But how significant will that change be? And exactly what will those changes be? We sat down with Philip Seargeant, author of the book "The Future of Language" (Bloomsbury, 2024 ), to chat about what language is, why scientists spent years trying to create a special language for nuclear waste, and whether we'll ever live in a silent world devoid of spoken language.

Ben Turner: Let's start with a question that's much easier to ask than it is to answer: How do we define language?

Philip Seargeant: Language is so integral to our lives — our social lives and our mental lives — that often you get this sort of slightly simplistic idea of it being just a means of communication. Sure, it's a means of relaying information from one person to another, but that's really only a part of it. Language is tied up with the way that we organize society and our relationships, how we present our identity, and how we understand other people's identities. I think that's one of the things that we need to be mindful of as we try to get a handle on how new technologies are going to change the way we communicate.

BT: A key idea that you return to in the book is the myth of the Tower of Babel. It's a story that has articulated our desire to bridge the gaps between languages since History began. How close are we to AI acting as a universal translator between human languages? Is a universal translator even possible?

PS: These are very good questions. The Babel myth is an idea from fairly early in the beginning of history that suggests that language use is somehow impaired — that there's something wrong with it. It's the foundation of what it means to be human, yet at the same time, there's some sort of essential flaw in it. There's two aspects to that: One is that we can't speak across language barriers, and two [is] that how we use language isn't exact or precise enough.

It seems we're at a point where technologies will imminently allow for instantaneous, real-time translation between big languages (at least the ones we have enough data for). The quality of this translation is pretty good; it's very workable.