“The 2020s Political Economy of Machine Translation”, 2020-11-02 (; similar):
This paper explores the hypothesis that the diversity of human languages, right now a barrier to ‘interoperability’ in communication and trade, will become substantially less of a barrier as machine translation technologies are deployed over the next several years. I argue that machine translation will become the 2020’s analogy for ideas to what container shipping did for goods trade in the second half of the 20th century. But as with container shipping or railroads in the 19th century, this new boundary-breaking technology does not reduce all boundaries equally, and it creates new challenges for the distribution of ideas and thus for innovation and economic growth. How we develop, license, commercialize, and deploy machine translation will be a critical determinant of its impact on trade, political coalitions, diversity of thought and culture, and the distribution of wealth.
[Keywords: trade, globalization, machine translation, inequality, productivity]