Below are what appear to be good developments in the area of what some call artificial intelligence.  Can you think of  how these are really not intelligent and of the positive and the negatives of each innovation?

Innovation Positive Negative
Voice Translator with Speech Recognition System UT-203

see: Ectaco website

The Ectaco Partner® UT-203 is a voice translator with a unique speech recognition system that provides phrase translation from English into German and Russian, or from Russian into English and German. The UT-203 contains 15 topics which include about 3000 phrases facilitating communication in hotels, post offices, banks, stores, restaurants, hospitals, beauty salons and many other places.

Advanced speech recognition system Lingvobit™ English and Russian was created using the voices of thousands of native-level American English and Russian speakers. For this reason, you can be assured that your pronunciation will be recognized by the device.

The UT-203 has a comfortable user interface and is easy to operate. A special multifunction Action Button allows easy switching to the topic you need. A phrase, once it is recognized, is displayed on the LCD display. The UT-203 also comes with a headset which makes working with the device more comfortable. The Partner® can also function as a digital voice recorder. The built-in alarm clock will help you to keep up with the time. The Auto Off function will automatically shut off the translator if it has not been used for a few minutes.

 

 When I went to Germany it was very difficult to understand and get directions.  This device would help and if it were to be improved so it could listen quickly and recognize and translate instantly and do so very accurately international communication when travelling would be so much easier for anyone.

It would eventually not require a person to learn a language but his own language and so save a person the time of learning a different language.

Idomatic sayings that are so hard to understand from one language to another would be easily translated using such a device.

Internatonal education would also be facilitated and if this was built into telephones people from all over the world could speak in their own language and be heard by someone else in their own language.

This could faciliate cooperation between people of different language and ethnic groups and break down a major communicaton barrier.  The idea at the Tower of Bable was that God confused our languages to keep us from uniting together against Him.  If one believes this is a myth a person might see this device as overcoming a major reason for divisions of humanity and they might think it would bring people together.

 The Tower of Babble effort was undertaken by people who all spoke the same language and the effort was to unite so they could get into Heaven without God's help.  The idea of getting rid of the disunity caused by language barriers for what purpose?  IF the purpose is a united humanity so we can build another tower of bable (i.e. be our own gods or make a robosapien who will be all knowing and kind of be like a god for us - which is what some of those working on A.I. have suggested - that robosapiens will be made eventually who know all knowledge and will be able to figure out so many wonderful things that they will help make us immortal) then I say this device would not be good for humanity if used for this purpose of unity apart from the One who Designed us for His purposes and eventually it will fail us.

It would fail us because the persons who have programmed it and put their intelligence and ideas of how words should be translated into it would nuance the translations perhaps according to their own ideologies and if not that would not always get it right and then someone would think the translator was right when it said something OFF of the meaning intended and confusion would be worst in this case because now the 'hearer' and the 'speaker' would think they had communicated but had really not.

People will stop learning other languages and so will depend upon the 'intlligent' device - really upon the few who know how the device is programmed and put power into the hands of those who manufacture and design these things.