IMMODEST DISPOSAL

AI-merged reality will not be possible until humans straighten language.

Peace, order, freedom, opportunity, all that we seek can never come to us until all people of every nation and condition can understand one another exactly, instantly. There can be no true justice, no true education until everyone comprehends, as well as you and I, the words of our laws and sciences. Orders can neither be given nor followed accurately.

What other purposes are there to speech? Words, to be of any use, ought at least to be firm in their sense-content. Yet look around you as people stumble and miss.

There is a word "love," with myriad meanings, and their confusion mothers a million heartbreaks. No sensible communication is possible when the same noun might mean a woman's wish for her daughter and a miser's obsession with his money, and this in one head but that in another.

Now that we have attained, in AI, a human-directed intelligence capable of absorbing and sorting empirically the entire corpus of human history and language, we have the tool to align them both with the great human future technology opens to us.

Once the technology is unveiled, top firms in business, the courts, and the diplomats will adopt the tool-kit of new words at once. They won't want to be left behind in whatever it's going to be. The rest will follow the money and the power. By our grandchildren's graduation day, if we have the courage to persevere, all will be AIspeak.

Some fear this will diminish the old languages. But it's not so; if you keep querying your search assistant, you will be able to find them. Nothing to buy or sell there, however; people will click it for the weird.

The near-unreadable voice in the old tongue, dark as Etruscan, the naked, tentacly words. The "English" in those texts will seem sticky with laps and clashes. Our heirs will recoil at our dictionaries: Irrational junk-drawers stacked bric-a-brack with ten centuries of clutter. Nothing set in order.

Our grandchildren will shudder, too, when they think of writers trapped in that frozen mud. The illuminated mind of our future will want to reach down digitally and touch the past with the clarified codes of AI English, with its admirable unities and symmetries. 

They will have been taught, our grandchildren, perhaps, that English audiences once claimed to enjoy such chatter and moan as is found in these "poems and plays." But, really, who ever could code a sensible paradise out of this Shakespearean stuff, all this drunken, broken birdsong?