key word "vision" title "manufacturing intent" in misc. flash fiction

When they announced they’d finally cracked universal translation technology, as had been predicted for decades in pulp science-fiction, near and far the whole Earth rejoiced. Finally, they said, there would have to be peace in the world because we would all understand each other and understand each other directly, no need for interpreters as intermediaries to parse out the subtleties, it would now just be a matter of time. As usual, however, as always happens with new “disruptive” ideas and inventions, no one had considered all the unintended consequences.

The problem was that to make universal translation work in a fool-proof manner, with all the dialects in the world, with all the nuances of meaning, with the way slang and neologisms mutate on an almost-daily basis, no database of all our languages cross referenced could ever contain or keep up with the weight that is all of humanity’s tongues. Instead, the work around was to not translate the words at all, rather to interpret the patterns of neurons firing from the speaker’s head and spit out what they meant. Not what they were trying to say but what they meant. Which as you can imagine, unlike in the Star Trek fictive future utopias, worked out quite disastrously and almost immediately so.

Clearly, politicians did not enjoy the idea that people would now directly hear their intent, not the story they were trying to tell. Businessmen and religious fanatics even less so. Not good for any of those modes of operation, you know. Such people stopped talking live in public at all, issuing statements typed or on tape, making everything they said suspect. Only the crazy would say something in front of translators, knowing they couldn’t lie anymore, even a little. Soon the only time any leader said anything was to their own people, in their own language, in their own little worlds without the translator machines rolling. Soon, there was even less communication across the gulfs of language or ideology than before. Pretty soon, we were only talking to the people we could “trust”, only talking to ourselves.

All in all, we’d thought universal translation had the power to finally connect us across borders and ethnicities, economic strata and faiths, into one shared vision of humanity’s bright future. All in all, it just drove us further into the echo chambers of our own little niches, only having trust of words when they are spoken to us as parts of our own little choirs, when they reinforce who we already believe we are, when they speak in the language that we already spoke.

Just like television did once and then the cable on top of that then the internet then social media on top of that too. It’s astonishing how we can get these marvelous tools to see each other as one but we always squander it by doubling down on our fear and our tribal self-identifications. Oh, I suppose that it’s a vision, all right. One hell of a vision.