I’ve always been afraid of the alternate reality that The Terminator proposed; with the rise of autonomous machines enslaving the human population and all. People tell me ‘stop worrying, we control the technology and nothing bad can come of it,’ but they obviously never spent their lives reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov in perpetual fear of technological singularity and the development of global computer networks which are structurally influenced by neuroscience. The one glimmer of hope for us is that we are programming these machines and we obviously can’t design a machine to do something we don’t yet fully understand, such as the intricacies of human language. The one thing I’m holding on to right now is how poor Google Translate can be in relation to human translation.
For example, in the Google translation of a news report about Kid Yamamoto saving a man who had fallen on to train tracks in Tokyo, you can get the general gist of what happened but a serious story about an MMA legend and current UFC fighter saving a man from being hit by a train turns into unintentional hilarity. Marvel at this quote from the machine translated article.
“When they see as a package method that train is coming,” I do not come, beauty, What “If you do not go, it was just. After having seen the actual men who had fallen, but limp in a faint together when I thought What … “trying to do … Wow.” without Mochiagara only slightly heavier Te, life in humans., as trying to help I was glad a little time loss. Who helped me get off other people Even I have my best people become”
I have no idea what any of that means but the story I can decipher is thus: Upon seeing a man had fallen on to the tracks and injured himself in the process Yamamoto ‘in fast motion’ jumped from the platform in front of an oncoming train and pulled the man to safety. The rest of the article seems to focus on a beautiful woman named Becky who may or may not be just a friend but let’s just pay attention to the fact that Kid Yamamoto saved a man’s life and can be classed as a hero. When the machines rise up, men like Kid will save us all. [Source]
