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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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As someone who barely uses AI and doesn't much care about it, it seems to me that what we have created is not artificial intelligence, but robot translators. A good enough AI can translate the vast fluctuation of semantic meaning from real people in real language into machine binary. This used to require immense technical skill and knowledge, but at some point will be available to anyone willing to put some time in.

They're called transformers for a reason. The thing is that a lot of professional skill is in fact translating from one domain to another. There's a famous French sketch about "hermetic languages" spoken by one's doctor, lawyer, mechanic, banker, priest and the common tune being that we are mystified enough by jargon to give people money to solve problems we can't understand. With sufficiently advanced translation, a lot of these kind of intermediaries go away.

The question is what is left that can't actually be reduced to translation, or can't be modeled statistically.