The 2020s political economy of machine translation

This article specifies and explores the hypothesis that the diversity of human languages, right now a barrier to “interoperability” in communication and trade, will become significantly less of a barrier as machine translation technologies are deployed over the next several years. We argue that machine translation will become the 2020's analogy for ideas, to what container shipping did for goods trade in the second half of the twentieth century. But as with container shipping or railroads in the nineteenth century, this new boundary-cost and transaction-cost reducing technology does not reduce all boundary and transaction costs equally, and so creates new challenges for the distribution of ideas and thus for innovation and economic growth. How we develop, license, commercialize, and deploy machine translation will be a critical determinant of its impact on trade, political coalitions, diversity of thought and culture, and the distribution of wealth.