Listening to the BBC this morning (Jan 13, 2024), whereby the guests were inter-language translators of literary books. The question addressed by the host of the program was: Will AI replace translators? After a group of translators of scholarly novels and poems was interviewed, it became clear that these folks will not be replaced any time soon, no matter how good the AI technology might now appear to be. The reason? Context!
For example, take the expression ‘Trump Matters’. Now a simple interpretation of this might be: “Yes, Trump is a human being and like all human beings he matters.” But someone who has absorbed lots of current affairs as it pertains to the United States might interpret it as a play on words based on the expression ‘Black Lives Matter’. If so, this introduces a whole new series of complexities for a translator. First one must understand that ‘Black Lives Matter’ is a movement in the United States that responded to the death of an African American, George Floyd, who was choked to death by a police officer. Within this context, the term ‘Trump Matters’ cannot be translated using the simple formulation and the translator must be familiar with the movement and with the intentions of the person who coined the term ‘Trump Matters’, who believes that he matters because he and his supporters are trying to suppress the history of the African American experience in the US, which is something that the Ku Klux Klan did throughout the United States within the period of American Reconstruction and beyond (1865-1960).
Neuroscientists now understand that objects/words are stored in the brain according to their context (Lu and Golomb 2023). Furthermore, when the neocortex/hippocampal complex is damaged one cannot learn new words (Corkin 2002); following cerebellar damage one cannot learn new movements as triggered by a declarative, conscious context such as an imbedded word (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024). Finally, following destruction of the language areas of neocortex, one is (forever) ‘blind’ to all words and phrases for both their reception and production (Kimura 1993; Penfield and Roberts 1966) even if the cerebellum remains intact.
In short, AI will not be replacing the human brain anytime soon due to the problem of storing ‘context’. It is the storage of context along with the object that makes an individual’s recollection of history unique, which means Einstein, Kasparov, and Pelé cannot easily be converted from one to the other, brain-wise. So, all the nonsense of hooking up different brains to transfer their experiences (e.g., Pais-Vieira, Nicolelis et al. 2013) is just that: nonsense (see Tehovnik and Teixeira e Silva 2014).
Until AI systems learn to determine meaning, translators can sleep peacefully. This is unachievable within a 5-10 year horizon.
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