A Semiotic Approach to Language Technologies: Translation as Technological Mediation

Descrierea eventului:

The AI race tends to be a race towards humanlike AI, which tends to be a race towards developing in silico cogent interlocutors. By developing a semiotic approach to understanding and assessing language technologies, I unearth why this pursuit, reminiscent of the myth of Pygmalion, is misplaced. In brief, humans tend to be simultaneously disappointed when the artificial interlocutor is mechanically repetitive and scandalized when it manages to simulate human ingenuity.

The engineering of digital language technologies tends to overlook the pragmatic dimension of (human) language, namely that language develops through utterances that, being situated, are conditional. Because they are situated, embodied animals behave conditionally, in terms of what may be the case under supposed conditions.

By explaining (technological) emergence as semiotic process, I develop a robust underpinning for the Mind-Technology Thesis, namely the refutation of mind-and-matter substance dualism through an evolutionist perspective that construes technology as mindwork. In this vein, semiotics corroborates with externalist theories of mind and postphenomenology in understanding mind and technology as mutually intrinsic. This leads to a semiotics-grounded advocacy of the view in philosophy of technology that for artifacts to properly communicate with biological organisms, they do not require “intelligence”. As such, the product of any language technology is useful only in contingency with a situated mind. Further, this leads to considerations on the literacies necessary for living with computing machines that produce linguistic utterances.