This morning I gave a keynote talk at the Spatial User Interaction workshop, in which I presented a kind of vision of the future. In the Q&A after the talk, people asked some really great and challenging questions.
In my answers to those questions, I realized that I kept returning to the same point: The most amazing thing about humans is our built in ability to communicate through natural language. Everything we do, build, create, comes out of that shared ability.
We so take it for granted that this superpower is “normal”, that we generally forget how astonishing it is.
To a sentient being that did not possess the ability to casually communicate their thoughts to each other, what we do every day, without even thinking about it, would seem like pure magic.
Consider not just our computer software, or our movies, books and plays, but the very clothing we wear and the buildings we inhabit, our bridges, roads, eyeglasses and coffee makers. These, and everything else we create, are basically outgrowths of our shared language instinct. Without it, none of these things would exist.
The fact that you are reading this right now and are immediately forming your own thoughts, theories and counter-theories in response, really is a marvel beyond compare.
Just didn’t want you to forget that. 🙂