Emojis are the New Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a language with very precise rules on grammar and syntax. If it had become the lingua franca of the world, the whole topic of “natural language processing” in the field of computer science would have been trivially easy! You can almost see the tech companies drooling about that imaginary world…just imagine the opportunities for a Facebook or a Google to see why.

Of course, making all humans worldwide learn Sanskrit is not an option. So Nick Carr wonders:
“The best solution, if you have a need to get computers to “understand” human communication, may to be avoid the problem altogether. Instead of figuring out how to get computers to understand natural language, you get people to speak artificial language, the language of computers.”
What rubbish, you say. All of mankind will learn to speak in 1’s and 0’s? C’mon.

Except it’s already happening! Do you know the “fastest growing form of language in history, based on its incredible adoption rate and speed of evolution”, as one British linguist expert terms it? It’s emojis, that huge set of emoticons so popular on the chat apps, the language of the “post-literacy world” as some call it. It’s so popular that Hillary Clinton even tweeted as part of her ongoing campaign:
“How does your student loan debt make you feel? Tell us in three emojis or less.”
Looks like the tech companies have found an alternative to Sanskrit after all!

Guess what’s scary about this new language? Let William Davies explain:
“One characteristic of verbal languages is that nobody can own them. Meanwhile, emoji characters are copyrighted, and software can be patented…Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.”

Heard of the Turing test? It was a test proposed by Alan Turing as one way to decide if computers had acquired human like intelligence. A human types a question; he gets a textual response from either the computer or the human:
“In Turing's test, if the human being conducting the test is unable to consistently determine whether an answer has been given by a computer or by another human being, then the computer is considered to have "passed" the test.”

If emojis are the new language we speak, what would it mean for a computer to pass the Turing test? Is Jason Lanier right in saying:
“The Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart.”

Emojis are the new Sanskrit. Dumb is the new smart. We live in a crazy world!

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