092 - Bridging Barriers

The world is full of cognitive, language, and cultural barriers.

Cognitive barriers (biases) influence how we simplify the overwhelming complexity of the world around us, rapidly and fluidly, every moment of every day. With significant effort, we can become aware of these processes and better shape them, but humans aren't built to escape them.

Language is a barrier that has historically exerted great influence over the sharing of ideas, beliefs, and values, limiting the degree and pace of understanding between any two variations. This is slowly being overcome through methods of automatic translation, but many hiccups in the translation process remain, and they don't inherently assist in face-to-face interactions.

Cultural barriers come into play in such ways as words with literal translations having very different contextual meanings. "Idioms" are a common example of literal translations that may not cross cultural barriers intact, as the context they invoke in one culture won't be the same in most others. However, Idioms are just the tip of a much larger and more subtle iceberg. Even the concepts of specific emotions mean very different things, as shown in studies focused on the US, Belgium, and Japan.

Among these three barriers, only language is reliably "visible", and as it is heavily impacted by cognitive and cultural barriers even that visibility is partly an illusion. Every exchange between members of two different cultures is subject to this, to varying degrees. Further barriers can also be stacked on top of this, such as religious and/or political beliefs, or any other group-level constructs, meaning that they are constructed by groups and learned or adopted by individuals.

Language may be naively translated, to some degree, by existing software systems. However, human-like concepts, understanding, and reasoning, which neural networks are incompatible with, are required to meaningfully address all 3.

Humans can likewise exchange information across these barriers, to some degree. That exchange remains lossy, with losses increasing across both more barriers and "taller" barriers, where the differences are greater between two points.

Both of these aspects of the status quo may be greatly improved. "Lossless" communication across all 3 barriers is perfectly possible, just not with humans or neural-network-based software systems. Both humans and neural networks can be incorporated into systems capable of this, but they cannot drive those capacities.

On the geopolitical stage, one thing is quite clear. The countries that choose to improve their capacities, enabling this lossless communication with one another, are likely to make the best allies, with the most intelligent and rapid responses. For companies that span and cross many political and cultural borders, this is that much more true of how well they may function internally.

Humanity's future requires lossless communication.

#ai #communication #translation #culture #bias

To put this in perspective, imagine if you had to rely on literally everything you communicate passing through 3 different translators. Each one of those translations loses something along the way, and you may have no way of knowing exactly what is being lost. What is lost may also be very different from one sentence to the next. Even with no conflicts of interest or malevolent intentions from the 3 different translators, much is lost.

On a related note, as one of the internet's pioneers famously pointed out in The Social Dilemma documentary, virtually every online platform has those conflicts of interest and malevolent intentions baked into it via "Attention Economy" mechanisms and data harvesting.

In Thailand, I've seen my own bias through my willingness to pay much more for services where I'm less likely to run head-first into a language barrier. The Thailand language barrier is a 0.16% improvement over Portuguese English fluency, 89th versus 90th rankings globally respectively for English, making it measurably more difficult than the 30th-38th place rankings spanning Malaysia, South Korea, and China. I've also recognized many cultural barriers through obvious signaling behaviors, but absent cultural context I have no idea what those behaviors are intended to indicate.