Could we ever decipher an alien language? Uncovering how AI communicates may be the key
Olaf Lipinski receives funding from UK Research and Innovation Centre for Doctoral Training in Machine Intelligence for Nano-electronic Devices and Systems.
In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently – with some assuming they convey a threat.
If humanity ended up in such a situation today, our best bet may be to turn to research uncovering how artificial intelligence (AI) develops languages.
But what exactly defines a language? Most of us use at least one to communicate with people around us, but how did it come about? Linguists have been pondering this very question for decades, yet there is no easy way to find out how language evolved.
Language is ephemeral, it leaves no examinable trace in the fossil records. Unlike bones, we can’t dig up ancient languages to study how they developed over time.
