The Old Testament's'Tower of Babel' story is an origin myth that tries to explain why humanity doesn't speak a single, universal language. According to the Bible, a united human race that speaks the same language arrived in the land of Shinar and decided to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven. Annoyed -- once again, it can probably be said -- by humanity's growing arrogance and budding hubris, God confounded humanity's speech, dividing its people into separate linguistic groups that couldn't understand one another. Just to ensure they don't start comparing and contrasting their languages to reach some form of translating breakthrough, God dispersed humankind to all corners of the earth and set the stage for what is today a world of 6,500 languages. For God, a job well done and the situation remained static for centuries, that was until tribes starting trading with each other, armies started fighting one another, and diplomats initiated conflict resolution measures to try to end the wars that were often started due to misunderstandings of one kind or another.

I've always found the fact that the acronym for artificial intelligence in English, AI, is surprisingly similar to the first two characters for that word in both simplified Chinese -- '人工智能'. The first two characters together, 人工, mean'people' and'work' individually, but when put together mean'artificial' while '智能' means'intelligent.' This is quite a fascinating linguistic experiment, and it's interesting that the two most widely used languages in the world came up a similar acronym or character for one of the most important technologies ever invented by man. Perhaps there is some weird universal synergy going on or maybe there's an easy answer hidden somewhere deep within the linguistic annals of these two languages. Either way, this got me thinking about language.