[winter45]

Concerns about consciousness, intelligence,and Stephen Wolfram's use of the personal pronoun aside, I think it reasonable to presume that communication with early stage AI systems will desirably include the development of a vocabulary and syntax structured for 'precision'.

It does seem reasonable that if AIs evolve they will, in their evolution, develop constructs of 'reality' that Wolfram calls "Post Linguistics Emergent Concepts"(1) and that, if they do, until human languages develop deeply "precise" 'words' for each of these PLECs, Spock will have to translate for Kirk; Spock, talking to an AI, will be (mostly?) unintelligible to Kirk.

This raises the question can one reasonably believe that humans are capable of more than 'bare bones' precision in words? Can one be both Kirk and Spock?

On that note it is encouraging that Wolfram appears to think our systems may be (become?) a driving force in our evolution; we may evolve to a point the use of a precise or imprecise language is a moment-to-moment choice.

It may be that these precise and imprecise languages will develop into a single language.

Before that happens, if you were such a dual-linguist, which language would you prefer? Under what conditions would you switch? What would communication be like in a world where the commonly spoken language was a meld of precision and imprecision? Which of the two would have the most influence on the other? Past a certain stage are there generally distinctions in character?

(1) see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMviBl46dXg

[laotzu]

This idea of Post Linguistic Emergent Concepts is an interesting one which Marshall McLuhan alluded to in his 1964 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. He suggested that the sheer speed of electric processing made the alphabet obsolete and that in order to cope with this drastic speed up in communication we would have to deprecate our slow spoken languages and adopt an entirely new method of communication:

>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.