A Technological Tower of ‘Babble’

In this, I’ll go over how technology CAN inhibit our abilities in language. It could also supplement and enhance language by creating oligio-syncratic syntax, but that’s like enhanced-human cyborg tongue and not what I’m covering herein. Interesting, but for another day.

When we have technological crutches that aid in our abilities, our abilities degrade. There’s a trade off, do we care about efficiency and speed or do we care about hand-crafted works and artisanal attention to detail?

When we use google to answer our questions, our language becomes lazy. As we get lazy it becomes a habit and a norm. If we were to forward our degradation of language from our over-reliance of technology, we may end up speaking in riddles.

Here’s a detour of two funny skits to illustrate the comedy and tragedy with language;

For instance, here’s this skit from College Humor;

Here’s the laconic short approach with a skit from the Office;

As our language evolves based on our tools and environment, we may get to the point of unrecognizable speech. We would eventually speak babbling in tongues to eachother. When our dialects and secret codes become too indistinguishable from eachother, we’ll be speaking in riddles.

Perhaps that’s where the different languages come from, a linguistic drift of languages. Hence why the story the ‘Tower of Babel’ gave us our different ‘Babbles’. An origin story to why we have so many different languages.

When we have Auto-correct text, people unlearn how to properly spell. They instead learn to rely on autocorrect or be lazy and indifferent to allowing the misspelling to be “good enough”.

Grammarly is another app that helps aid in grammar. When we lose our ability to construct syntactic structures of our language, we further degrade our ability to speak. For the majority of users, we lose our ability to perform grammar without the tools that perform grammar for us. We may become overly reliant to our tools, like a crutch.

When we are lazy with our words, our syntax, our grammar, our sentence structures and questions; then we are lazy with our thoughts. Because thoughts are structured and are a reflection of both our written and spoken word.

A mirror between all three exists.

It’s not accurate to say it’s a mirror but they’re all connected is what I mean. In a tandem-relationship. They are reflected, so it’s apt to say there is a mirror, but not quite.

Writing-Speaking-Thinking

If we are lazy with our writing. It will bleed out into our speaking and thinking.

If we are lazy with our speaking, it will bleed into our writing and thinking.

If we are lazy with our thoughts, so too will our words be dull. For we often think of thoughts in words or pictures. Pictures or ‘mental images’ being a pictographical representation of the word, in symbolic form.

Thus, it brings me to this.

When we use Artificial Intelligence-

We are in fact, engineering ourselves to be reliant on the Intelligence instead. Becoming somewhat of cyborgs relying on external intelligence to essentially ‘think for us’.

Ai becomes a new intellectual crutch. No longer are we seeking for answers, instead we are focusing on prompt engineering to find answers from the list of approved answers already fed and programmed into a machine.

A tower, a construct, Ai is such a construct. Similar to the Tower of Babel. Ai is a tower in it of itself.

If we are to be overly reliant on this Ai for our search, talking, translation, etc. queries.

Then we may inhibit our ability to critically think without AI.

Thus we may result in a Tower of Babble story should we lose AI or even the internet.

It’s like the google search engine degrading our search queries and prompts, eventually we will do the same but with AI which will learn to make our prompts simpler. AI will eventually utilize algorithms and predictive models to make our prompts dumber than what we type in Google Searches.

People’s social skills have degraded due to incessant online discourse and interaction. Internet and all. That’s arguably a fact.

Technology is meant to be a tool to aid in doing extra-ordinary things.

We have cars, yet how many of us choose to walk or run? It seems merely an accessory of exercise that we normally don’t have to use, yet there are detriments to our health for not walking or running. From a lack of exercise, we can see measurable results between societies with cars and those without. For better and for worse.

There’s always a trade off.

I think it’s unwise to write-off the use of Ai, but I also think it’s unwise to be devoid of critical thinking and to be overly inundated with Suggestions from Ai or algorithms.

It’s a balancing act.

You’ll have to decide for yourself where on the spectrum you rely. When is it too much to use these tools, and to be aware of what you’re losing or sacrificing when you over rely on such tools.

I’m not saying “tech bad”, I’m literally using technology to write this. The Internet, my keyboard, my spell checker. Lol.

What I am saying is “use Technology responsibly”, much like one would drink responsibly. We should be able to control ourselves in stoic discipline when it comes to our vices as well as our de-vices. Sharpen your mind, be aware, be present, and learn and adapt. Grow and Evolve.

Well, those are just mere suggestions from a single webpage by a random anonymous(to you) author on the infinite scrolling rolodex that we dub, the internet.

Cheers, and don’t you forget that Words Mean Things.