Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late
To me, AI’s scariest aspect is the so-called singularity—the threat of a runaway intelligence explosion leaving humanity in the dust. But today’s state of the art in artificial intelligence is already auguring smaller but still shattering scenarios.
Some people so deeply yearn to climb Mount Everest that they prepare for years, spend vast sums of money, exhaust themselves for weeks in the climb itself, and repeatedly put their lives at risk. Does that sound like you? Or would you rather just land on its summit in a helicopter and feast yourself on the great view? And what about scaling the metaphorical Everest of a foreign language? Two small episodes in my life in the past month led me to serious musings along these lines.
Two weeks ago, I watched, for the first time ever, a video of myself back in 2018 in Hangzhou, China, as I struggled mightily for three minutes to make a few off-the-cuff remarks to about 20 young people from Shanghai who belonged to a club of AI enthusiasts. They had traveled 200 miles to Hangzhou to meet me for dinner, and for two and a half hours we had spoken only English together, but toward the evening’s end they asked me if I wouldn’t mind saying something very brief for those club members who hadn’t been able to make the trip. Uh-oh! Panic city! Even though I had devoted many arduous years to the study of Chinese (always thinking of the daunting phrase “Learning Chinese is a five-year lesson in humility” as a ridiculous understatement), and had worked like the devil during the previous three months in Hangzhou, I was caught way off guard by their request and, although in the end I obliged them, I felt super jittery while doing so. Shortly thereafter they sent me the video, but for all these years I hadn’t dared to look at even
