Linguistic Challenges

When Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of one’s language are the limits of their world, he not only left an indelible mark on philosophy and linguistics, but he also set a reasonable standard by which to judge the “intelligent” machine. Linguistic ability will doubtlessly be the last significant barrier to the creation of functional artificial intelligence, and it will need to be language engineers rather than computer engineers who eliminate that block. 

The central challenge in teaching a computer to converse is that -- despite the work of Chomsky, Halliday, Pinker, and dozens of other brilliant linguists -- we still really don't understand exactly how language works with the human brain. We don't know for certain how our brains connect knowledge or make connections, and without that knowledge, our ability to imitate human intelligence will be stilted.

However, that being said, our inability to create authentic artificial intelligence at this point in time is not a good reason not to keep pursuing the proposition. It is true that the mindset challenges writing for interactive media and their potential implications bring are enough to create a foreboding sense of posthuman terror in most of us concerning the future of writing and hypertext. We are, in fact, nearing a point of decision: do we push forward directly into the danger or hit the back button and retreat to more familiar ground to shore up the existing infrastructure before making that foray? If we accept that we live in a non-linear world, of course, either choice is wise and productive, and both paths will eventually cross and inform each other at a later point.

Whichever road we choose to travel, collectively or individually, it can be reasonably argued that we already have at our disposal all of the tools we will ever need to solve these dilemmas. The act of writing itself is, as described nearly two decades ago by Flower and Hayes, a problem-solving activity, and the act of writing itself appears to be the only logical way for us to find ways through the “writer’s blocks” hypertext presents and into a world where the potential of interactive media can be fully realized. In only a very few years, we will look back at the Internet of today as a rough draft – primitive scratchings on the cybercave walls done by people who didn’t seem to realize what they had stumbled on. In order to be part of the new linguistic world, whether is be posthuman or neo-humanist, the main thing we will need to do is learn and teach writers to play with our linguistic limits and let the language pull us out of the last century’s bindings and into an expanding and connected universe.