Arabic 2.0: Reimagining Our Cultural Identity in the Age of AI
A talk for the Arab and Muslim Students Society at the University of Oregon on Arabic and technology, with a recorded presentation and downloads.
Series: arabic.computer
I recently did a presentation to the Arab and Muslim Students Society at the University of Oregon about the Arabic language and its challenges with technology. The abstract of the talk was “Why is English everywhere in tech? Why is Arabic script challenging for computers? As our lives become deeply ingrained with English-based technology, will Arabic become an afterthought or something we fight to keep alive? This is not a lecture but a conversation. The goal of the talk is to drive Arabic forward, even beyond its stringent rules. We will explore the history of Arabic in technology (from 1970s computers to today’s AI), then collectively discuss any innovative or practical ideas that you have. So let us think differently.”
The presentation was positively received. To share the presentation with the wider audience, I rerecorded the material and used both Arabic and English when discussing each slide. The revisited presentation is below:
The key takeaway is 1) the Western influence through colonization, missionaries, education, and media over the Arab world since the 19th century weakened the Arabic language in the Arab world. 2) During the period between 1940 and 1991, the Western world was innovating in the development of computer hardware, software, and the Internet, while the Arab world had no time to innovate because it was under constant occupations, wars, and struggles. 3) The complexity of the 1200 Arabic glyphs covering the variations of the Arabic letters had to wait forty years after the invention of the first computers to be properly used in the Arab world. Yet, it is still not at par with the English language since the entire technology remains English-dominant