AI, Empire, and the New Babel
From Babylon to Silicon Valley, the dream of a single universal language has always preceded the fracture. Volney saw it coming.
Every empire builds a tower. Babylon built it from bricks. Rome built it from roads. The United States built it from highways and television signals. Silicon Valley is building it from large language models.
The Tower and the Tongue
Volney spent a chapter of Ruins of Empires on language — on how empires impose a common tongue to bind their subjects, and how that tongue fragments the moment the imperial grip loosens. He could not have imagined a tongue spoken by silicon. The pattern, he would have recognized instantly.
"Men resemble each other so closely in their hopes and their fears, that all empires are but variations on a single dream."
The new Babel does not need a tower. It needs only a model large enough to flatten every dialect, every idiom, every local way of meaning into a single statistical average. The question Volney asks us, two centuries late, is whether the fracture has already begun.
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