Lectures and presentations
'Humans, Machines, Language': A new Special Interest Group of BAAL: What happens when we're all cyborgs? -- SEE BOTTOM OF PAGE (final link) to download slides
All experts: Sayers, Dave
Activity details
Nature of event: Scientific conference
Name of event: British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) annual conference
Presentation type: Other public presentation
Start date: 05/09/2024
End date: 05/09/2024
Year: 2024
Description
The human-machine era is coming -- a time when technology is integrated with our senses, not confined to handheld devices.
What will this mean for our use of, and beliefs about, human language? We advance two key features of the human-machine era: 'speaking through technology' (where tech significantly augments our language so that we no longer see or hear people's original language); and 'speaking to technology' (having increasingly long and complex conversation with evermore intelligent conversational AI devices, able to hold conversations on a wider range of topics, registers, levels of formality, and imitating different human's voices.
We also consider a range of pressing critical concerns, for example unequal access to these expensive new technologies, and dramatic differences in quality among languages -- more dramatic still between spoken languages and signed languages, the latter unlikely to enjoy anywhere near such transformative experiences for many years to come.
This new Special Interest Group of BAAL is constituted to succeed a Horizon-funded 'COST Action' network that ran 2020-24, 'Language In The Human-Machine Era'.
Follow-up groups: School of Wellbeing (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Well; Emergent work in the digital era (University of Jyväskylä JYU) EWIDE; Digitalization in and for learning and interaction (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.LearnDigi; Cyber security (University of Jyväskylä JYU)
Profiling areas: Cyber security (University of Jyväskylä JYU); Digitalization in and for learning and interaction (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.LearnDigi; Emergent work in the digital era (University of Jyväskylä JYU) EWIDE; School of Wellbeing (University of Jyväskylä JYU) JYU.Well
