Language, Bliss and Curse
Language is something we all associate with communication. Together with all the living and long dead people we used it as the main means of communication.
The Memetic Human-Machine Relationship
Thoughts have their own agenda. They are trying to survive and merge with other minds' generated ones (Daniel Dennett has a nice view here). If organisms want to survive, so do concepts. Both push for an existence, either biological or abstract.
Most of our history, language as we know it brought us all such great achievements. It looks counter intuitive to question its powers and talk about its limitations. It is a very powerful dogma.
If you look at language as a tool to help us be more efficient in communication, things might change. There is a possibility that sooner or later language could cease being so efficient. Could become as evasive as today's communication through art. Without the aesthetics and beauty which comes along. Instead will carry increased ambiguity.
The Communication Efficiency Problem
This challenge is not a new topic and people with time and resources try to solve it as we speak. Large corporate budgets are spent to align broad communication within internal teams. Or aligning deep semantics and terms within management and outside partners or consultants.
IATA (International Air Transport Association) spent enormous resources to train and develop an in-house method to limit the errors coming with natural language. It succeeded but the solution applies to one language (English) and addresses a niched sector of communication (aviation). It took years of training but it paid off. As a pilot, you don't want to be misunderstood by an air traffic officer or vice-versa. Or as a passenger. While in the air.
Still, there are big challenges with current approaches. People rarely check out the efficiency of the communication. We assume when you say something and no one argues back, that it is 100% understood. It varies a lot with topics/people/etc but if I would have to estimate, I would say it's less than 50% and dropping. Quality of communication is a percentage of shared knowledge per unit of time. Below a level, the more we speak, the more we drop the quality in a death-communication spiral. It happened in history many times at civilisational level.
Why It's Almost Impossible to Fix
On an individual global scale it is almost impossible to handle the challenge. Here is why.
First, it requires the existence of some external structure supporting and compensating the inherent inefficiencies in communication. A big corporation or IATA may overcome this problem with an increasing time/resources budget. People do not have this option.
Secondly, this problem is evolving in the sense that the quantity and diversity of information expands. Human knowledge expands fast. And so should be the budget/time to cover it. Should be designed to grow exponentially. People do not have neither infinite time nor budget.
Third and the most important weakness is that it only works in closed systems. Like thoughts within our heads. Human communication is a two way street. If only solved one way, you did not solve the problem, you may as well amplify it. You only have a relatively small power of change over your own internal thoughts, let alone the external ones. This is why top-down (brain centered) solutions like Neuralink, in my mind, are designed to handle just part of the problem. A bottom up solution has to emerge also.
The Limited Options
Today you can do one of the following:
- Isolate yourself in a closed community (as IATA which acts as a closed, single-objective utilitarian company).
- Limit the inflow of information (e.g. in business take a look at any customer service today: they limit the inflow because they cannot handle it) or politically (censorship and freedom of speech talks).
- Try to impose or manipulate your own way of understanding. This is from a position of force. Manipulation or propaganda in democracy. Force in dictatorships.
All the above solutions will put us sooner or later outside of the game in an evolutionary designed life. No freedom degree is weakening the system.
The effects of poor communication are all over the place today. From world wars to domestic fights. Anxieties and depressions or simple day-by-day small misunderstandings without yet aggregated consequences.
I would dare to say communication is the underlying problem of all our deep fears. From nuclear wars to environmental issues to AI takeover. We are all, as in the IATA system, in the air right now.
A Feasible Path Forward
How would a feasible option look like?
To solve the two way street of communication at scale in a short period of time, the human ability should be somehow already there. Embedded within ourselves as it was in the case of language. You take a child from deep Malaysian jungles and move them to New York and they are capable of learning to speak instantly. (By the way, this was done and it is an argument of why our capacity to speak language didn't evolve at human scale).
Technology can help but should be universally available. Requiring no external support such as an organigram of people. Dropping marginal costs. Ideally with a foreseeable cost cap. Language is a good example: it is a universal ability with mass adoption (>85% world literacy). It has low costs: limited hours of people around (family could do it).
Should be able to coexist with all the other existing forms of communication. The evolutionary process is arborescent.
Heart as Teacher
Here is an idea.
Humans are in a constant flow of communication. Our hearts act as our body's internal chief communication officer, among other things. As we are entering the post-intelligence design era, why not put our hearts in charge of our communication and move to the observer side for a while.
At Adiem, we use a suite of multi-sensory companions to enlighten human-to-human communication from the deeper level of the heart. Imagine we are all semi blind and deaf and we have to learn a new braille or sign language with more nuances. With all available tech around.
We take people's heartbeats while communicating and make them visible as colours. Or hearable as sounds. Or feel them on your wrist through the haptic engine of the Apple Watch. All through a form of communication we call Synerative Art.
Heart as an organic Teacher of communication.
As if when watching a movie you see the subtitles in an unknown language. After a certain time, our inborn neuro-plasticity learns to associate previously unrelated stimuli. And suddenly you speak Spanish.
What We Already Know
Backed by science, we already observed some patterns and we know a few things by now. Observing the heartbeats:
- When alone, we know how open we are to listen to others. We call this Empathy. It is a measure derived from the variability of distances between the heartbeats (measured in milliseconds).
- When in a group, by analysing multiple heartbeats interactions we can measure the level of Resonance. Or how well we understand each other. It is a collective sign representing the quality of communication.
It is not much but it is something.
We, as Humans, are still in the air.