English to English translation is something I'm quite excited about. In the past, we focused on translation between languages. I think in the future there will be an increased focus on translation within that language, intra-linguistic translation - transmuting English.

The main enabling technology here will be large language models. Examples would be translating corporate speech to plain English, translating passive aggressive to calm and peaceful, translating sensationalist writing to neutral writing, translating implicit and heavy with subtext writing to direct and assertive. Some related concepts to this would be things like Russell conjugation, which is something that Eric Weinstein has talked about and can be thought of as implied tone by word choice.

Some specific ways that can improve communication are that I think a lot of language is a lossy communication format. And this is part of the reason why humans like memes and emojis and images and videos and of course, being with someone in person, body language, and so on. Those give us more dimensions to the communication written and like pure written or pure spoken word. Even if it has tone, it still lacks a lot of data points.

Some specific ways English-English translation can improve communication would be mostly related to making the implicit more explicit. One thing I see a lot of is people struggling to be assertive about their preferences. Instead of saying, "Hey, I would prefer that we did it this way," someone feels the need to explain that they can't express that directly and instead, they give a bunch of explanations or justifications or arguments for why that way is the "better way." They're doing that to try and get the other person to go along with that, but really, what they want to say, on some level, and what they are actually feeling is just that that is their preference, and they hope that the other person would go along with their preference.

Of course, there are a lot of examples of passive-aggressive negative communication as well between people where people will make passive-aggressive comments. Instead of saying, "Hey, I'm feeling bad about this," or "I didn't like that," or "I don't want to do that." There's, of course, a bunch of cases in the news where many things are written very, with heavy sensationalism. These can be translated to much more neutral and much more peaceful in general when writing feels kind of full of aggressive tones. To me, that mostly feels unnecessary, and I would much rather have it translated to something that's calm and peaceful and more direct.

Instead of the person making a bunch of aggressive, passive-aggressive, negative remarks, which as a side note is often seen on a site like Hacker News, it's much more conducive to peace from my perspective for that to be rewritten as a direct, neutral turn, set of writing. Instead of saying, "I'm really surprised you do it this way. It kind of seems like the other way is much more obvious. And this has slow performance and this has this and this has that," when really what the person is trying to say is, "I wish you would have talked about this method instead because I liked that method more." There are also many examples of this in person, between couples and friends.

The main challenges for doing this, I think, are making it easy to use and accessible. Imagine the future when everyone's wearing augmented reality glasses; we will have apps or plugins that can do this for us. Certainly a bit Black Mirror, but I know that a lot of people will be interested in it and will find benefit in it. It's possible now, of course, just directly using GPT. And that's quite an effective way to do it. It'll also help people, particularly those in situations where it's harder to read other cues or for people that struggle to read cues, or for foreigners that have less of a grasp of tone and maybe are using a lot of their mental energy just to understand the words and therefore don't have as much mental space to understand the implicit subtext in communications.

It's all generally possible today, at least in a written or spoken form, and GPT-4 with either a zero-shot or a few-shot prompt is quite good at it in most cases. I hope to see in the future this kind of thing integrated into other places, like having it integrated into my Chrome browser so that I can have all the text that I read on the web translated into a way that is very neutral and peaceful, rather than being written in a way to try and evoke an emotional reaction from the reader. The same thing would be helpful for customer support reps. It would be great if all of the customer complaints and requests can be translated from something that sounds aggressive and would be stressful for the customer rep to read, into something that's very peaceful, very direct, but also has a note that "this customer is feeling very bad about the situation." That way, it communicates the same thing but in a way that is a lot easier for the customer support rep to handle it peacefully.

In a lot of cases, you'll want to see the original if you so choose. In some cases, you'll just want to only see the translated version. I would definitely want this for getting rid of marketing speak and corporate speak online as well. There are so many websites written in an overhyped way that says very little. It'd be great to just have it translated down to more direct points, and that's something that we would see is like, "Okay, there wasn't much substance to begin with in the writing if we remove all the nonspecific vague marketing speak." But the use of nonspecific vague marketing speak is a signal in and of itself, which is the signal as, "Hey, we are the sort of company that's happy to use nonspecific vague marketing speak, so if your company requires you to work with other companies that use nonspecific vague marketing speak, then you'll be right on in with us," which a lot of large enterprises I think actually need. So, you can communicate that instead of indirectly; you can communicate that directly. "Here's the bullet points of fact. And also, we are the sort of company that is comfortable with lots of vague marketing speak, and we don't want to tread on anyone's toes."

English-English translation is something that I want as a user and something that I expect we will see a lot more of now that we have tools like GPT-4.