Language Your Mind

The next time you say “butij pimo lupuma,” you won’t be talking to humans. You will be ordering your personal robot in ROILA to “get that bottle.” Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are devising a spoken language for robots. RObot Interaction LAnguage or ROILA is built to suit both, human brains and robotic logic. ROILA is intended to be easy for people to learn and easy for robots to grasp.

Humans have always been fascinated by languages, and verbal communication has been the first to bear the impact of evolutionary changes. During the last century, human evolution has been centered on major lifestyle changes influenced by mechanization. Recently, electronic gadgets have intruded human lives and the first aspect that they are changing is the way we communicate.

Gadget gifts

Texting, that has been the gift of mobile communication devices, has already changed (read spoilt, if you please) our language. The changes that were earlier limited to written forms are now transcending spoken barriers. The change is unnoticeable but certain. And now, while the future looks laden with androids, it won’t be a surprise if we converse in ROILA not only with them but also with humans.
We haven’t limited our cryptically creative communication conundrum to converse with robots; humans have always tried to decipher new language for themselves. Esperanto was the first attempt to unite the humankind on linguistic basis. It is the first artificially created language of the world. It was devised in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, and officially recognized by UNESCO in 1954.
But that was in the years when humans lived quite docile lives unhindered by gadgets and geeks. As electronic gadgets started influencing and smearing our lives with sci-fi, humans are trying umpteen of fruitless attempts to devise languages that will establish communication with celestial bodies and aliens.
New lingo on the block

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish and Marc Okrand’s Klingon are two latest breeds of languages. These languages have been an attempt to bridge universal requirement of singular language that can be deciphered by humans and aliens alike.
Any new evolving language will need to intentionally bend as many rules of human language as possible. Modern texting meets most of these conditions as it is doing away with gender, tense and punctuation, and hence is more popular and easily adopted among the younger generation who is concerned more about intent than content.
Back to the future
Humans should be ready to listen to any sound that will, actually, be a language in the future. Machines, robots, aliens… you never know what will influence your existence, and in order to get going with them you will need to ‘language’ your minds.

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