And where would you put "billions of people now have access to better translations on demand"?
People talk about business as though only the owners of the business benefit. Everybody else pays the price. But aren't the main beneficiaries all the people using these services?
> billions of people now have access to better translations on deman
As a German speaker, I experience the quality of German language technical documentation steadily declining. 30 years ago, German documentation was usually top notch. With the first machine translations, quality went notably down. Now, with LLM translation, it's often garbage with phrases of obvious nonsense in it.
This is especially true with large companies like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.
I guess the situation is better for languages where translations only became available with LLM.
Are you saying that somebody took translations that had already been written and replaced them with AI generated worse translations? That has got to be a rare exception, no?
But more to your point: you might not have run into languages that didn't have proper translations available, but billions of other people did. In the past I read a machine translated book before. It was almost like a derivative work because it would randomly differ by a huge amount from the source material.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Where does it say that? I have never read any Book of Genesis that says "God destroyed the tower".
Also it doesn't say "God was afraid". God doesn't have negative emotions like that. God plans out everything, so He is not "afraid" in the human sense.
In fact, I am fairly certain that the mythical "Tower" for the Jews was sort of a parody of the Pyramids of Egypt and the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia. They were essentially mocking their ancient neighbors in the Levant for such a frivolous project that they believed really didn't honor God, but increased their arrogance and hubris.
In fact, the Sumerians worshipped a god named "Sin" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(mythology) and it is believed that the "plain of Shinar" and the "wilderness of Sin" are cognate with this term, and therefore represents the ancient deity that was worshipped in that particular case.
For Egypt, the pyramids were funerary monuments, i.e. they invariably honored some dead Pharaoh. The Jews invested their engineering progress in building a temple of the Living God instead.
So it stands to reason, in the Hebrews' account of the foreign projects, that immigrants would come in, mess up the project enough, and they would kinda abandon them in progress. But they weren't destroyed.
Well ideally they don't, and when the bubble eventually pops and they go bankrupt we're left with a wide set of useful local models and cheap surplus hardware to run them ourselves. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.
People talk about business as though only the owners of the business benefit. Everybody else pays the price. But aren't the main beneficiaries all the people using these services?