Against Hypertranslators
This is what communication isn't.
Many years ago I had an idea about how to use LLMs. I thought perhaps they could facilitate communication between people who have difficulty understanding each other by predicting and supplying the context that each needs to clearly understand what the other means. Kind of a “hypertranslator”. For example, your live conversation with a new acquaintance might be footnoted and visually illustrated by a sort of “heads up display”, in such a way as to predict, address, and forestall the misunderstandings to which each listener is predisposed. You’d always be able to “get your point across” to anyone, as well as to deeply grasp what others are trying to say.
The hypertranslator struck me as a distinctly good way to use the technology, something that would build bridges and reduce misunderstanding. But I later realized that it is not just a bad idea, but a truly awful one. It would be a terrible and frightful thing for people to understand each other “more clearly” in this way. Strauss said somewhere that clear understanding does not necessarily increase the peace between people, and he is right. There is more to this than just grouchy pessimism, or the positive claim that people have dangerous deep-lying metaphysical disagreements (although, they do). I should also add: while it is also true that advertisers and other bad faith actors would misuse the “hypertranslator” for manipulation, that is not the problem I’m getting at. Instead, I want to unpack the discomfiting suspicion that even between two good-faith communicators, this particular kind of “clearer understanding” would not, in general, be a good thing.
Why?
At work in my initial attraction to the “hypertranslator” was a confusion between (a) what I am inclined to call real communication, and (b) the transmission of “Shannon information” (which I discuss more here). Shannon’s view of information implies that when A has a pattern, and B receives the same pattern, information has been transmitted. On this view, when one person has an idea in his head, and tries to talk about it, and the listener doesn’t end up with a perfect mirror image of it in her own head, the communication has been deficient.
On the contrary, genuine communication runs through a different kind of connection, which is not at reducible to multiple parties having mirror-image copies of the same Shannon information. (It also doesn’t help to say that you also need the context around the Shannon information, if by that you just mean more Shannon information...) No: When I speak with you, we might communicate successfully precisely because you understand what I say more clearly, or less clearly, or differently, than I do—not in spite of that “transmission infidelity”. Conversely, we might lose our connection, or end up in conflict, because you understand exactly what I have in my mind.
An LLM that predicts and supplies context needed to help you understand what I have in mind would only help us achieve mirroring—a state where the pattern in my head matches the pattern in yours. But getting our ideas to mirror has nothing to do with truth, beauty, friendship. It is certainly not sufficient to constitute communication. (I’m not being sentimental. I am using words exactly.)
If communication doesn’t depend on shared Shannon information, what does it depend on? What’s it about? It’s about sharing and respecting names. Not just my name and your name, but any and all names we invoke. “Me: I am a 49ers fan.” “You: Me too!” That’s a connection, a space for communication, and all the more so because we don’t need to know, at least for the time being, exactly why we’re fans, or what it means to us.
To give a somewhat more complicated example, consider Dworkin’s “interpretive concepts”—words like justice or democracy, which, he says, play a special role in the polity’s definition of itself. These things are names. Names refer to real things, but imperfectly defined and imperfectly known real things: objects of permanent interpretation and epistemic uncertainty, which are not separable from their name. “Me: I believe in justice.” “You: me too!” The point is not that justice is not a real thing. It is every bit as real as you, me, and the San Francisco 49ers. The point is that our communication will become more difficult, not less, as we penetrate to the heart of what it really is; or, as we start to communicate using mere labels and empty symbols, rather than names.
The things to which names refer are never merely “physical”: a person is more than just a body, and a city is more than just a bunch of buildings in a place. Likewise a speaker cannot bring any named thing before a listener’s view merely by conveying “information”. In fact, the more a named thing is depicted by Shannon information—rather than simply named—the more the speaker and listener will be divided by a sense that they are not speaking about the same thing. Names need to be interpreted by each conversationalist for himself, not necessarily because this procedure leads to the truth (although we cannot rule that out), but because this is how the parties bring themselves into relation with the name, and then through that medium, with each other.