Is this fair? With Al image generators like Dall-E Mini going mainstream, it'll only get easier to communicate in images. I'm afraid we're losing something essential, like actually having something to say." -Wordsmith
Dear Wordsmith,
Your question assumes that there is a clear boundary between written languages and images, which, I'm sorry to point out, isn't true. Many writing systems, including cuneiform and Mandarin Chinese, originated with pictograms. While it may be difficult at present to express complex ideas in emoji (excluding the successes of some enterprising artists who have, for example, translated Moby-Dick and the Bible into the vernacular), there's nothing to stop these Unicode symbols from evolving into a full-blown language. I could also point out, as many linguists have, that modern languages like French were dismissed as "artificial" in their early days, or that all the hand-wringing about textspeak, reactions, and GIFs echoes earlier anxieties that some new development-the printing press, writing itself-was going to make humanity regress into a herd of gurgling simians. Even Nabokov, whose titanic vocabulary contained words such as pavonine (peacock-like), callipygian (having beautiful buttocks), and logodaedaly (the arbitrary or capricious coining of words), once argued that English would benefit from a typographical symbol for the smile.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2022-Ausgabe von WIRED.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2022-Ausgabe von WIRED.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
SPIN CYCLE
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.