What’ll It Be? Emoji? Textspeak? Lines Of Computer Code?
When you think about the future of language, you might worry that we’ll all walk around speaking in weird code. Or perhaps that we won’t speak at all, instead just texting each other all day. But fear not! In this episode of Futuropolis, we discover that the spoken word (and words in general) aren’t going anywhere. They’re just morphing in cool and crazy ways. To figure out technology’s role in the future of language, we talk to Fred Benenson, the author of How to Speak Emoji and Emoji Dick, as well as Jerome Pesenti, who’s working with IBM Watson to improve the language abilities of artificial intelligence. And to discover how the past informs the future, we dug into some particularly entertaining archival musings about universal languages and whether slang can really ruin English as we know it. For a glimpse at which languages will survive the test of...