common culture of the future?

AI and the Tower of Babel

In my regular work, I am responsible for hiring foreign labor to work in our family restaurant. Over the past few years, I’ve seen a pile of resumes, cover letters, and reference letters from all over the world looking for line cook jobs.

Here’s one:

Dear Maddam, I am hoping to be working with you in the future. I work two jobs always and you know I am a good employee. I have two references for you I was Chicken cook at Popeyes, and prep and salad maker at Steamboat. Thank You, XXX

The phrasing and grammar differences are delightful to me, and I look forward to this time of year, so I can enjoy the acquired language of my new hires.

But this year, I haven’t recieved one of those letters. All of my letters look like this:

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am writing to express my strong interest in the available Cook position as advertised on Seasonaljobs.dol.gov. With my background in Cooking I am confident in my ability to work and contribute to your team.

I am located in Jamaica therefore I'm seeking a H2B Visa Sponsorship, I have attached my resume below for your perusal.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours Sincerely,

XXX

Look how clear this letter is. It’s formal and completely devoid of mispellings and grammatical mistakes. There are no signs of this person being from a foreign country at all. So, either I’ve put a Babel Fish in my ear (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a fish that one puts in their ear and it translates any language), or my applicants are using AI.

Maybe they are one and the same; the Babel Fish and AI. The story of the Tower of Bable comes from Genesis 11:1-9, you know, the Bible.

The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

³ They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

⁵ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ⁶ The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

⁸ So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

So, God apparently didn’t like it when we all spoke one language because we could really get some shit done, like build this rad tower that got us pretty close to God’s own realm.

“Too close. Too close. Humans are not God. I repeat. Humans are not God.” said God.

AI image generated with my text: an etching of the biblical Tower of Babel, a half built tower from the beginning of civilization.

I am equal parts enchanted by and afraid of AI. I am enchanted because with AI humanity has a common language. I can communicate with another person in a far away land and learn their experience. On the other hand, AI scrubs away what is unique to culture—our very own words and isn’t our culture where our identity lies?

Leslie Marmon Silko think so. Silko, an American poet and essayist of Laguna Pueblo descent, has a great poem called Ceremony where she talks about the importance of maintaining our stories and culture because it’s what makes us who we are.

Ceremony

by Leslie Marmon Silko

I will tell you something about stories,'
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They're all we have, you see.
All we have to fight off illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty,
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories,
but the stories cannot be confused or forgotten.
They would like that.
They would be happy
because we would be defenseless then.
[He rubs his belly]
I keep it in here,
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it.
See?
It is moving.

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and what ever she thinks about
appears.
She thought of her sisters,
Nau' ts' ity' i and I' tcs' i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.
Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.
She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now
I'm telling you the story
she is thinking.

Is AI a dominant culture where we deny our own language and defer to the new language, or is it a potential common culture where we might willingly give up what is unique in order to rebuild the Tower of Babel? or maybe AI, the new Tower of Babel, will teach us deference to other cultures— highlighting commonalities and how to navigate our differences. Perhaps this new tower can help us hold on to our histories and release us from its bonds at the same time.

I also wonder if our common language will soon revert to a combination of words and pictures beyond what we have today.

Ciao, -n