Why would I ever need that?

After Wednesday’s announcement by Google of its new hardware product line, a colleague of mine stopped by my office to tell me how excited he was about the new Google Pixel Buds that perform automatic language translation. You can see a video of them in action here.

While Google might be pushing Apple on a fully connected product line, I don’t think their events have reached the polish of Apple’s events. That’s beside the point of the event, which was to push Google’s move from “Mobile First to AI First.” According to Google, we’re moving from a world where we take our devices with us wherever we go to one where these devices know more about us than we do. Google is working toward a future where you have a seamless interaction with their smart computing devices. And it won’t be a single device, but multiple devices that melt into the background of every environment in which you find yourself. These devices will constantly collect data about you so that they can adapt themselves to what you’ll need hopefully before you know you need it. If you’re nervous today about your devices collecting information about you and your actions, and sharing that information with the company that created the device (and that company’s partners), just wait. It will get worse.

But back to the Pixel Buds. Automatic translation isn’t new to Google. If you used Google Chrome, it has for a long time automatically translated web sites written in a language different than the one you use to your language. Pixel Buds are just a natural next step, and one that has long been discussed in science fiction literature.

Once my colleague had finished expressing his excitement, I asked him two questions. First, I asked if Harvard College should continue to require our undergraduates to learn a second language. There are clearly advantages to learning about a different culture through their native language, but with automatic translation available to everyone everywhere, should our language requirement be rethought to take account of this significant change? I don’t know the answer and neither did he.

For my second question, I asked, “What kinds of new threats and biases will surface when we rely on machines for language translation?” Just last week, we talked about industries where the Internet and computing technology had drastically changed the types of jobs available, and already there’s talk about the future job prospects of professional translators. (The quotes in the linked article sound like people with their heads in the sand.) And this past week we talked about the lack of thought about security being put into the IoT world. Will we see attacks in the future where someone messed with a Pixel Buds’ translation to subvert an important conversation? Moving from security to the world of bias, will we see bias in a Pixel Buds’ translation depending upon what Google has learned that you like? If you’re a Democrat, will you get one type of translation and a different one if you’re a Republican? Will Pixel Buds translations continue societal biases like men are better than women at mathematics? I hope not on both counts, but I don’t see these issues in the Google announcements I’ve watched.