Brian Roberg's Blog

Babel and Epistemological Crisis

LLMs are really good at translating between human languages. You can connect your smartphone to an LLM and use it to translate a conversation in real time. Combine that capability with earbuds and you have a real-life version of the babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Douglas Adams' "babelfish" was, of course, a reference to Genesis 11. In that passage God confuses human language in judgment (and mercy) on mankind for their self-satisfied hubris in building the Tower of Babel. This account is one the Bible's most significant comments about how God views human technology. The fact that we've now produced technology that seems to undo the judgment at Babel does not seem to bode well for our future.

I realized something today that may reframe that assessment. For a few years now it's seemed clear to me that generative AI is leading our society toward epistemological crisis—a collapse of confidence in what we know and how we know it. What we call "deepfakes" are only the most sinister form by which generative AI may end the "seeing is believing" era we've enjoyed for all of living memory.

This means that, even though generative AI seems to defeat the confusion of speech that God wrought at Babel, it may also destroy our ability to know anything beyond what we (or people we personally know and trust) experience with our own senses.