Natural Language is a technology

Classical examples of technologies are machines like a steam engine or a mechanical calculator. These artifacts are presented in a museum about history of technology and its evolution is explained. There is a much bigger technology which is usually ignored by the classical research called natural language.

Natural language is a communication code used by humans to send messages back and forth. Typical languages are German, English or Mandarin. The reason why languages are usually not recognized as technology, is because its not a machine but used entirely by humans. During oral interaction there is no need for external apparatus because language can be generated only with the own voice and is received by the biological ears.

The reason why it makes sense to treat language as technology too is because it had a great influence for the evolution of technology including machines. Milestone technology in the history of mankind like the Gutenberg printing press, the telegraph or the internet have the purpose to improve communication by language. For example, the HTML file format allows to store large amount of written text in a digital format which can be books, online forums and newspapers. The Gutenberg printing press was invented for a similar need. It allows to duplicate the written word.

Modern examples for language processing machines are large language models which are used in chatbots and voice controlled robots like the figure.01 humanoid robot. In both cases, the machine is processing natural language with algorithms which results into a very powerful technology.

The assumption is, that future machines, not invented yet, have also the main purpose to process natural language. Its likely that artificial intelligence is realized by advanced language understanding algorithms. This allows to mechanize words, phrases and communication in general.

timeline:

1440,printing press by Johannes Gutenberg
1844,morse code by Samuel Morse
1915,Therblig notation by Frank Gilbreth
1954,Georgetown-IBM Experiment with russian translation
1968,SHRDLU natural language understanding by Terry Winograd
1989,Speech activated manipulator SAM by Michael Brown
2003,M.I.T. Ripley robot by Deb Roy
2011,IBM Watson Question answering by David Ferrucci
2023,Wayve Lingo-1 self driving car