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Letters
Letters
Mindful Missives on Machines • A Bar For Truth • Let Fly At Fry • Explaining God • A Life of Liberation • Get Them While They’re Hot
Mindful Missives on Machines
Dear Editor: The article in Issue 168 where Vincent Carchidi discusses the limitations that currently prevent AI systems from reproducing human linguistic creativity has important implications for language learning. According to Noam Chomsky, learning your first language is the product of an inborn brain faculty, through which all infants, unless unusually deprived, will gradually but spontaneously develop mastery of the language of their environment. Other researchers, however, argue instead that this process is similar to the growth of other cognitive skills. Whichever of these theories is the more accurate, the fact remains, as Carchidi admits, that its most sophisticated outcome, appropriate language use, is obscure, and difficult to reproduce in a machine. This obscurity also characterizes how we learn a second language.
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