The 2020s Political Economy of Machine Translation
This addresses the economic and social implications of machine translation for global communication and trade, but it is incremental as it builds on existing discussions about technology's impact.
The paper examines how machine translation could reduce language barriers to communication and trade, but also warns that it may unevenly lower boundaries and create new challenges for idea distribution, innovation, and economic growth.
This paper 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.But this new boundary-breaking technology does not reduce all boundaries equally, and it creates new challenges for the distribution of ideas and thus for innovation and economic growth.