The Tower We Didn’t Mean to Build

**September 2025.** Apple announces a feature that sounds like science fiction: real-time translation through AirPods. Two people who share no common language can now have a face-to-face conversation, each hearing the other’s words translated instantly into their native tongue. The technology, called Live Translation, works on AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, translating conversations in real-time across English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, with more languages coming .

For anyone who has fumbled through foreign interactions with phrase books and apologetic gestures, this feels miraculous. Soon, language barriers could be nearly eradicated. We could work, trade, travel, perhaps even fall in love, with people whose language we’ve never learned. The ancient curse of Babel, it would seem, has finally been lifted.

And yet, as I absorbed this news, I felt not triumph but unease. Something about this achievement rang hollow—not because the technology doesn’t work, but because it solves a problem that no longer feels like our most pressing one.

THE TOWER AND THE CURSE

The story of Babel appears in Genesis 11, though you needn’t believe it as scripture to recognize it as profound metaphor for human ambition and its consequences. After the flood, humanity spoke a single language and settled in Shinar, where they decided to build a great city with a tower reaching the heavens—not to worship God, but to “make a name for themselves.”

Observing this unity and ambition, God intervened by confounding their speech so they could no longer understand each other, scattering them across the earth and leaving the city unfinished . The name Babel itself, derived from the Hebrew verb meaning “to jumble” or “to confuse,” became synonymous with the fragmentation of human language .

Whether you read this as divine punishment or etiological myth explaining linguistic diversity, the insight remains: **humanity’s greatest projects founder not on lack of ambition or capability, but on our inability to understand one another and coordinate action.**

For millennia, these language barriers have been real and consequential. The Silk Road required networks of interpreters and multilingual merchants. European explorers—Leif Eriksson, Columbus, Magellan—carried translators or learned rudimentary phrases, yet still catastrophically misunderstood the peoples they encountered. Empires rose and fell partly on their ability to communicate across linguistic boundaries. Trade, diplomacy, science—all were constrained by the curse of Babel.

But slowly, we’ve been chipping away at these barriers. We’ve built institutions: interpreter networks, translation bureaus, language schools. We’ve created tools: dictionaries, phrasebooks, language-learning apps like Duolingo. Ten years ago, traveling through Japan and Asia, I discovered I could point my smartphone at any street sign, restaurant menu, or billboard and watch Google Translate render it instantly into English. No more guessing what I was eating—though admittedly, less fun attempting to interact with locals. The feature seemed to remain one of travel’s best-kept secrets, not widely discussed among travelers, but absolutely game-changing for those aware of it.

Now comes Apple with its Live Translation. The technology isn’t perfect—Apple warns that outputs “may be inaccurate, unexpected, or offensive” , and it’s not available to EU users due to AI regulation concerns . But it works well enough to enable real conversations across language barriers. The technical achievement is genuine. Within a few years, linguistic Babel could be, for practical purposes, solved.

We’ve stormed the heavens. We’ve overcome the punishment. We’ve proven that human ingenuity, persistence, and technology can indeed transcend the limitations imposed upon us.

So why does this feel less like victory than irony?

THE REALITY WE LOST

Recently, I encountered an observation on social media that crystallized something I’d been struggling to articulate: A person from 1981, waking in 2025, wouldn’t be most shocked by smartphones or electric cars. They’d be staggered by the complete disappearance of shared baseline reality.

In 1981, most Americans got their information from three television networks and a handful of major newspapers. The three major networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—accounted for almost 70 percent of all prime-time television viewing . In 1980, Walter Cronkite’s last full year as anchor of CBS Evening News, he and his competitors drew an average nightly audience of 53 million viewers . Cronkite was known as “the most trusted man in America,” and when he signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” that phrase carried genuine authority—it actually was what mattered in the world .

You could argue with your neighbor about politics, but you both started from the same foundational facts presented by the same trusted sources. Today, everyone inhabits algorithmically-curated information universes. The true shock wouldn’t be the new technology—it would be discovering that the very concept of commonly accepted truth has shattered into fragments.

The ensuing discussion was revealing. Someone noted that shared reality in 1981 was still *curated* reality—just centrally rather than individually controlled. This is a crucial distinction. We traded the systemic risks of centralized control—censorship, institutional bias, single points of failure—for the risks of decentralization: echo chambers, radicalization, and the erosion of any factual baseline. The old system could be dangerously biased, but the new one seems designed to eliminate the very possibility of consensus.

The research on this phenomenon is more nuanced than popular discourse suggests. Studies in the UK and several countries show that most people have relatively diverse media diets, and only small minorities—often only a few percent—exclusively get news from partisan sources . Recent experiments tweaking Facebook’s algorithms found no effect on polarization, suggesting solutions are trickier than previously thought .

Yet the subjective experience of fragmentation is undeniable. When users curate their feeds by constantly reacting to and sharing articles from preferred news sources, they develop politically isolated networks—epistemic bubbles where they miss out on news articles, including even those from their preferred outlets . Echo chambers act as mechanisms to reinforce existing opinions within groups and move entire groups toward more extreme positions .

By the early twenty-first century, the three major networks’ combined share of the television audience had dipped below 30 percent . The fragmentation isn’t just about having more choices—it’s about the dissolution of any common informational ground.

THE TOWER WE ACTUALLY BUILT

Here’s the bitter irony that keeps me awake: We’ve solved linguistic Babel with extraordinary technological sophistication. Apple’s Live Translation, Google’s visual translation, real-time interpretation across dozens of languages—these actually work. Two people who share no common tongue can now conduct business, share ideas, even express affection.

But while we were so focused on translating *words*, we built something far more insidious: **epistemic Babel**. We’ve created perfect translation but zero communication. We can speak the same words while inhabiting completely different realities.

The technology companies—Apple, Meta, Google, TikTok—are the tower-builders of our age. But unlike the original Babel, no one *intended* to fragment reality. This tower emerged from optimization for engagement, from algorithmic curation designed to show each person more of what they already believe, from business models that profit from attention regardless of truth.

We didn’t build this tower to reach heaven or make a name for ourselves. We built it to connect, to share, to access infinite information. The fragmentation emerged as an unintended consequence—a feature, not a bug, of systems optimized for engagement over understanding.

Research from Princeton shows that as people curate their social networks, polarization emerges naturally, even without knowing others’ partisan identities . The harm compounds: individuals become isolated into intractable camps, rendering the political system incapable of addressing the range of issues necessary for government to function .

Think about what we’ve accomplished: **We’ve overcome the barriers that prevented people from understanding each other’s language. We’ve erected barriers that prevent people from understanding each other’s reality.**

A Japanese businesswoman and a Brazilian engineer can now negotiate a contract through AirPods, each hearing the other in their native language. Miraculous. But two Americans, native English speakers both, watch the same event unfold and emerge with incompatible accounts of what happened, what it means, and what should be done about it. They don’t need translation—they need shared reality, which no algorithm can provide.

The original Babel scattered humanity across geography because they couldn’t coordinate linguistically. Our new Babel scatters humanity across epistemology—we’re scattered not across space, but across incompatible realities, unable to coordinate because we can’t agree on what’s true.

GOD’S LAST LAUGH

Perhaps the lesson of Babel was never really about language at all. Perhaps the tower’s sin wasn’t the specific ambition to reach heaven, but the deeper pattern: **human pride in thinking we can transcend our limitations through cleverness alone, without wisdom about consequences.**

We’ve done it again. We identified a problem—language barriers—and threw our considerable ingenuity at solving it. We succeeded brilliantly. We can now translate in real-time, breaking down walls that have separated peoples for millennia.

But we didn’t notice we were simultaneously building new walls—higher, harder to see, more insidious. We were so busy translating words that we forgot to preserve meaning. So focused on connection that we enabled division. So proud of our technological sophistication that we missed its second-order effects.

The tech platforms are our ziggurats, and we built them with the same blind ambition as Babel’s architects. We meant well. We wanted to bring humanity together, to democratize information, to let every voice be heard. We wanted to overcome distance, ignorance, isolation.

And like Babel’s builders, we’ve been struck with a confounding—not of language this time, but of reality itself. We can understand each other’s words perfectly. We just can’t agree on what they mean, what’s true, or what we should do together.

If there’s a God watching all this—or simply the impersonal forces of emergence and consequence—I imagine divine laughter. Not cruel, but knowing. The kind of laughter that comes from watching humans repeat the same pattern: brilliant enough to build towers, blind enough to miss what the towers will do.

We solved Babel. We’re scattered anyway.

The question isn’t whether we can overcome these new barriers. It’s whether we’ll even recognize them as barriers before we start building the next tower—perhaps one with artificial intelligence that can translate not just words but thoughts, customize reality perfectly to each individual’s preferences, and scatter us so thoroughly we forget we were ever meant to build anything together.

And that’s the way it is. Or at least, that’s the way it is in my algorithmically-curated version of reality. In yours, perhaps it’s different.