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Comment by pmyjavec | Hacker News Reader

Actually, this tech could actually be a serious setback for language learning and communications in general. It's amazing how many people have taken the time to learn English around the world, which has made business and traveling easier.

Will there still be interest and investment in learning one of the biggest languages in the world, if you can just use translate.google.com? I hope not personally, but it does make me wonder if this will put things back somewhat as we get complacent and lean on technology to translate for us.

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I don't see it happening. People still have to talk to each other, don't they? I realise google translate can translate your audio input these days, but no matter how good that speech recognition comes it's still much more awkward. It's fine for getting a taxi or getting something at a shop, but unsuitable for a real conversation. It's a bit inappropriate in a business meeting, or in an intimate talk, to speak into your phone and have a synthesised voice give a machine translation of your thoughts.

I welcome advances in machine translation with open arms, but I can only see them as an augmenter, not a replacement. Time will tell.

Also, privacy issues. You might not want to leave a log of all your conversations on Google's servers.

Right, that's exactly what I wonder about. It would be a sad irony if universal translation made us _less_ cosmopolitan.

Then again, what about the calculator analogy? I'm sure that when calculators came out, some people must have thought it was the end of arithmetic studying, for example. And, I can do calculus with a machine, but more people study calculus now than ever before. Maybe languages are no different?

It happens with pretty much every technology. Socrates said writing would make people dumb because they wouldn't exercise their memory.

http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/

Ok, so maybe Socrates wasn't entirely correct, but it doesn't mean his argument holds no value. I mean, how do we measure the impacts books have had on our brains? Learning without correct guidance can become a problem too and books and the internet encourage that, it is becoming a problem in my opinion. Teachers shouldn't yet be replaced by online videos, but they are.

Our brains are shrinking and while some think it's because the brain are growing more efficient, others think it could be that we're becoming less intelligent. In the case of the latter, how do you know technology does not have a hand in this?

This study shows that using GPS technology has affected people's spatial awareness abilities [1]. I've stopped using GPS technology because of this, I no longer wanted to feeling "clumsy" and slow when traveling or hiking. There is also some talk of "The Google Effect" [2].

I'm definitely not anti-books and I'm certainly not anti-progress, but I honestly think it's naive to believe technology is always beneficial to society, always stands for progress, or that we're ready to posses certain technologies.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494407... [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...

That's true. That probably sounded more dismissive than I intended. I think we would do well to consider the downsides of new technologies and explicitly accept or reject them instead of just hoping for the best.

I'm not sure about you, but virtually nobody I know can do anything other than basic integer division anymore. The calculator DID cripple our ability to do basic arithmetic.

Not that it's a meaningful thing in itself.

Yes, nobody calculates in their head above 100 or 1000, but the domain where calculation has really made a difference is in AI and scientific modeling, a domain far away from the small calculator with 4 operations.

Maybe people are going to limit themselves to learning a few words in a foreign language and translate the rest. But in 50 years, maybe all humanity will be learning a new language designed by AGI, a language with concepts that are revolutionary and completely different from ours, that will help us talk to the AGI on its level. Who knows what will come in languages. Google is already using a kind of interlingua to connect from any language to any language.

I mean the quality of the translation is good...but not that good for deep understanding. It is good enough for informational messages, like news stuff, but for things like reading a paper/textbook, where sometimes you need to spend hours to read certain section repeatedly in order to fully understand the meaning behind, this thing is far from being good enough to be useful.

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