When Machines Talk

Communication is an amazing phenomenon. Many millions of years ago communication started as a bare medium to express the innate feelings of hunger, fear, anger, threat or camaraderie through sounds and gestures.  Watching a documentary on Animal Planet or Wild Discovery reflects how the animals in the wild communicate. Not just among the same group or within the same species but among beings of different species as well as with the environment. For instance, monkeys could be seen sending out alarm calls to herds of deer caught unawares by crouching tigers; and both the deer and the tigers understand the significance of their calls. Elephants can be seen trumpeting wildly asserting their rights over a patch of green land during the dry seasons and all the encroachers understand the impending threat. Plants too can be seen responding to external stimuli, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes quite more visibly. For instance, on long stretches of highways one could often see leafy trees bent towards the traffic on either side of the road as if forming the roof of a palanquin, quite metaphorically of course.

To begin with, the communication needs of human-beings were limited to what was wanted and what was needed.  Just the basics. And then we began to grow. Our needs and wants leaped the invisible boundaries of animal life and raced towards limitlessness. Different dialects evolved, languages came into being, sounds were captured by pens and pencils, writing and calligraphy developed; signs and symbols were invented -- some vocal and some pictorial. With all these our innate feelings also underwent a change; and in the process, an interesting genre of signs and symbols came into being. Words or symbols which in their plain flavor were simple meaning words suddenly began to convey something more; sometimes teasing and at others a more sinister meaning, bordering on deeply painful or dangerous emotions. For example, the words Black and White. In it and of itself, they just convey the idea of two different colors. But a person using them could imply a myriad of different sentiments, meanings and concepts through the sheer pronunciation of the words, a look of the face, an exhibition of body-language, the context in question and what not. Anyways, so the idea put forth so far has been the bewildering progress that human-beings have made in the field of communication.  

These days we have mind-bogglingly diverse channels of communication. How? Because we have learnt not just to talk or sulk with one another but we have learnt to talk to machines. Every software program that is written is a message sent to the computer, one of the most wonderful of machines we have invented. With it, we are capable of not just talking or texting to each other but we can exchange information through an enormous variety of media- words, text, signs, emoticons, pictures, you name it. And this trespasses all boundaries of land, water, seas and all the spaces in between. We can communicate with each other not just from across the globe, but even from the skies above, thanks to the flying aircrafts, space stations, space-crafts et al.

 

At some time or the other most of us must have shared a sense of bewilderment at how much we have progressed. But we have seen it happening all around us all the time, ad nauseam that sometimes the stuff that should fill us with wonderment and probably some dismay; just leaves the imprint of a mild smirk. Technology, machines and devices and human learning have brought us far, far away from where we started. And now we are in a state when we have begun teaching machines to talk to each other. For instance, the television remote has learnt to communicate with the television set.  The cell phone knows how to talk to your computer and share pictures, files and other data. Google is teaching cars to drive around on the roads. Soon we would be in a World where a driverless car would fetch you up from wherever you are, bring you home and the house would know to welcome you.  It might scan some biometrics data and unlock the door; sense your mood from the same biometrics scanning and turn on the air-conditioning to the desired temperature, switch on the lights adjusted to the brightness wished and turn on the television or the music system to play the stuff that soothes you. Sounds fantastic, isn’t?  Yes, it’s all nice and hi-fi and sci-fi but such eerie reality might soon alienate human-beings and make them into something not very desirable to the human race. For then, the very need of people to communicate with each other would be rendered redundant, probably unwanted even as we would be cloistered by machines talking to one-another and communicating with humans in the mechanical ways trained by us.

Communication that is elevated to the stature of a skill, a platform of culture, an intricate art ought to be learnt and studied would perhaps become just one of the options to be set via one’s mobile phone or a tiny chip embedded somewhere. And in the transition, wonder if human beings could continue to remain human or would we be transformed into the image, a prototype of the robots we are so obsessed with creating.