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Return to the Age of Reason? Welcome to “TRUEgle Translate” BY CLAUDE DECLOUX
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bout 400 years ago, fueled by the import of a magical drink from Ethiopia called coffee, the intellectual centers of Europe began to change mankind dramatically. Before that, the unreliability of clean water supplies often meant that a typical drink for public consumption would be ale, wine, or meade, created through the fermenting or distilling process to remove impurities. Not surprisingly, those beverages rarely inspired creativity and analysis. With the introduction of hot coffee, Western Europe took a huge leap of consciousness— both physical and philosophical. Historians call this the Enlightenment, and its result was a period of inspiration and renewal known as the Age of Reason. I came across a wonderful essay by Daniel Levitin, the Distinguished Faculty at UC Berkeley School of Business, who reminds us of where we are as a society. The Age of Reason, he writes, “drew a line in the sand between rumor and fact, between testable hypotheses and anecdote, and between demonstrable facts and nonsense.” The Age of Reason led us to the germ theory of disease, and ultimately to many social improvements which we take for granted, including those “inalienable” rights which Thomas Jefferson so eloquently cited in the Declaration of Independence. Coffee houses, with their caffeine-fueled consumers, became centers of discussion, debate, and social progress. Mankind’s desire for knowledge is clearly unquenchable, except when our own biases find facts inconvenient and ignore them. Remember, we hominids spent hundreds of thousands of years trusting our gut and developing protective biases. Relying on them is much easier than evidence-based thinking, and a 28
AUSTINLAWYER | JUNE 2022
welcome avoidance to analysis. The overwhelming power of bias was proven in Paris in 2017, when 20 of the top violinists in the world were given 12 violins to judge: Six were prized older instruments like Stradivari and Guarnari, and six were modern. After hearing and playing (blindfolded) the instruments, the violinists totally failed to discern the differences. Yet afterwards, having seen and heard the results with their own eyes and ears, each virtuoso made excuses for such failure and continued their preferences for old violins. But finding truth through analysis of data is difficult and demanding, and in this age of information overload, we are simply worn out. While we depended in the past upon trained journalists to enlighten us, to improve public policy, and to help us separate fact from fiction, the availability of such skilled writers is declining. In 2021, Pew Research says that about 55% of Americas rely completely on unregulated social media for their news. Journalism be damned. We all know the truth is out there; reliable sources can be
Mankind’s desire for knowledge is clearly unquenchable, except when our own biases find facts inconvenient and ignore them. Remember, we hominids spent hundreds of thousands of years trusting our gut and developing protective biases. combed, sorted, and assembled; and realistic conclusions aggregated by artificial intelligence, right? Eureka, I have the solution! And we’re already seeing its use. The greatest divider between cultures in the history of man has been language. The complications posed by hundreds of languages prevented exchange of ideas. Master translators were required for all international progress, and for the re-publication of literary and scientific data. Learning new languages has never been a priority in this United States of America. But we now have free automatic translation software (like Google Translate) allowing us to translate text among hundreds of languages fairly easily, so nicht schwitzen!
[“don’t sweat it!”] The savior of the human race shall be massive Supercomputers. The IBM model called the “Intrepid” supposedly can perform 100 quadrillion functions per second. That’s enough to figure out a modern “shortform” U.S. tax return in less than an hour! (Unless you have to also figure out the Obamacare form). So, why can’t these supercomputers aggregate billions of pieces of data, sort and confirm, and instantly fact-check a politician, professor, or business mogul for factual accuracy and, after a few seconds, a green light and beep would usher in the A.I. voice generator with its analysis? In truth, researching this, I learned that one of the most advanced A.I. voice generators is called
