Kelly: Emergence of technologies

A creole language is when people are forced into a situation where they're working alongside or living alongside people who are speaking many different languages and they have no shared language with which to communicate. It happened in places like Hawaii, when people came from Latin America, from China, North America- multiple languages were being spoken. They had to work together, they had to invent a language, essentially, to be able to communicate. That's a creole language. The interesting thing about creole language is that it works for the users in terms of their capability to communicate with each other but as linguists look at the grammatical structure of a creole language they argue that it does not actually conform to the essential rules of what human language systems have to have in place to be a meaningful language, to be a living, real language. The fascinating thing is, that the very first generation of children born to creole language speakers actually transform it into a pidgin language. And the pidgin language absolutely conforms to everything that the linguists would use to describe the appropriate grammatical structure, etcetera, that define a living language. What's fascinating to me about that is that at that generational phase, the humanity takes over. So, human beings invent something as adults, to help them communicate. People born into it, actually make it human. They make it meaningfully human. I think exactly the same thing is true of technology. I think that technologies are created as tools in the first instance in ways that are actually not wholly human. Not wholly in sync with human values and human experience and human motivation. And I think that the first generation of children born into a new technological environment take them from being tools and incorporate them into being part of human life, human existence- in exactly the same way as the children of the creole language speakers make it into a pidgin language, which actually does conform to human language systems. I think it's a very interesting analogue and quite a useful one to keep in mind, because I suspect that 'we ain't seen nothing yet' in terms of the power of the connective technologies that are already changing the world. As the next generations grow up with that they will make that meaningfully human in a way that we have not seen yet.