Sure, if you're not into personal growth. Not everyone wants to become the useless bit of lard sitting in a chair while a computer does everything for them. Yet. Some of us still like to do the actual things, but just need some assistance along the way. We still have a bit of time before we're all the humanoids from Wall-E

> We still have a bit of time before we're all the humanoids from Wall-E

Obligatory reminder that the movie itself explains that people are what they are not because of their lifestyle, but because of the time spent in low-gravity environment.

not sure that really matters to the point

I love when people use this pathetic extreme examples, when they don't have any meaningul arguments.

That isn't an extreme example at all, people used to mill grain and make clothing by hand, now we don't. We somehow are not sitting around getting fat even though technology takes care of those tasks.

The parents suggestion is that if we don't have to learn languages that will lead to us all laying down drinking big gulps while robot slaves take care of us. Their take is the extreme example. People have literally made this same suggestion about every technological advance and it never comes true.

Not necessarily. It depends on the use case. For taking a vacation, having an AI that can instantly translate to your native language would be amazing. That’d solve a lot of real world problems, no doubt.

However, translation has a great deal of subjectivity embedded in it, particularly when there aren’t 1:1 translations. Case-in-point: there are many English translations of the Christian bible, all similar enough, but there are enormous variations in some cases. And there are at least as many branches of Christianity as there are English translations of the Bible. Some of them strictly recommend the same translation, and they still disagree on the meaning of various passages.

Besides the problems inherent to translation, learning another language gives you another paradigm of thinking. The words we use, the way we construct sentences, etc., all impact our view of the world. Here’s a paper that discusses the impact of the over-reliance on English in cognitive sciences, and how this has downstream effects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466132...

Learning languages as an adult also has protective benefits. It reduces the probability of Alzheimer’s (maybe dementia, overall?).

In the way that watching porn is better than having sex.

It depends on what your goal is; for some tasks it's possible that getting the AI to do it is best, but, e.g. the existence of auto-pilot doesn't mean that hobbyist pilots wouldn't benefit from/enjoy exercising the same skills manually.

Even a perfect human translator following you around wouldn't be anywhere near as good as knowing the language yourself.

Maybe prior to fluency, for something like an odd business or tourist trip.

But there's a point in language learning where you can come to express yourself directly in a new language without intermediary "thinking" in your first tongue. The communicative and expressive potential of that mode is much higher than trying to squeeze one's intent through any kind of translation, machine or internal.

Plus, you know, it's fun.