Are we Babel fish yet?
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. 1
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
If you stick an LLM in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. Well, not really, but kind of? LLMs were originally created to translate text, and they’re fantastic at it. Since conception, we’ve gotten things like real-time text translation from video, multi-modal models nearly able to hold a conversation, and live translation. These features, however, don’t gestalt into the Babel fish’s seamless translation. Rather, the technology remains a translator – a third party interlocutor.
Smart earbuds might translate well, but a truly Babel fish level of translation could require a neural prosthetic a la Neuralink. If we do achieve direct neural language-like communication, a true synchrony, you might “hear” through the babble of languages. 2
Until those cyborg days, I can use LLMs to work through more advanced Spanish texts. Getting through an interesting Spanish text was constantly interrupted by dictionary lookups. With the pre-Babel fish tools I can read sentences aloud, asking for translations and explanations as necessary, or just take a picture of the page to get the crib sheet. It feels like having a language tutor available to answer my García Márquez questions 24/7.
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Because the rest of the passage is also incredible:
↩︎Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.”
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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Old-fashioned of me, but unlocking potential through brain surgery on healthy individuals comes off like a good old Pandora’s box for society. Is modification required to compete? How does obsolescence work? Who gets access? I assume individual potential will win the argument for modification eventually. ↩︎