Well, the issue you point to here is the flux of language, which is a real problem. There is no "English," we have no academy like they do for French (which is bullshit anyway), and we never will, and it would be impossible. There is just a series of languages each wholly understood only by the speaker, and perhaps people in the immediate culture of the speaker.
Now, this is sort of a problem, but it's not as though we are walking around confused all day. We make it work, we formalize, we come up with a perscriptivist framework, even if we live in a decriptivist world.
We can do this with any issue brought up with being verb "problems." Our Julius Caesar issue is fixed by a simple convention (yes we have conventions in English as we do in formal languages). Getting people to follow the rules is the only problem, and it will eventually fail, but that doesn't mean we won't have a few hundred years of it working, possibly more.
The issue of practicality is an entirely different question. Currently, it's an absurd proposition, that isn't to say however, that it isn't doable. Especially with greater computational power in the future. I think saying it's impractical is a cop out. The amount of energy that goes into learning languages is immense. If we were able to learn one syntax, nearly identical to English, that could convert instructions into readable code, we'd enter a renaissance of programming akin to art after the photograph was invented, or the current renaissance of music we've created with the invention of the synthesizer and sampler. Skill would evaporate, ideas would reign. People would complain that proper rules aren't being followed like they always do, but the amount of programs produced would expand so far that the cream would rise to the top and the world would be a better place.
I guess if I had to boil the problem down to a thought, it would be this: the effort required to build a system capable of interpreting the nuance of language would be as much or more than building a system capable of generating and implementing its own ideas. Once you have a sufficiently powerful AI, you don't even need to tell it to do anything; it should just do it based off sensor data.
If, for security reasons, you wanted to shackle an AI from making and acting on its own choices, you would need to shackle its ability to interpret language as well because they are the same thing. You have to make choices about implied intent when interpreting language; and those choices. You can't just restrict a machine to making choices on linguistic interpretations if those interpretations then lead directly to action (in the case of natural language programming).
We can (and have) created sets of natural language interpreters for specific situations: Siri is a good example of that. But by and large these are hacks that flag specific situations (such as creating a reminder or opening an app) and pick out the relevant phrases and plug data into fields.
Now, this is sort of a problem, but it's not as though we are walking around confused all day. We make it work, we formalize, we come up with a perscriptivist framework, even if we live in a decriptivist world.
We can do this with any issue brought up with being verb "problems." Our Julius Caesar issue is fixed by a simple convention (yes we have conventions in English as we do in formal languages). Getting people to follow the rules is the only problem, and it will eventually fail, but that doesn't mean we won't have a few hundred years of it working, possibly more.
The issue of practicality is an entirely different question. Currently, it's an absurd proposition, that isn't to say however, that it isn't doable. Especially with greater computational power in the future. I think saying it's impractical is a cop out. The amount of energy that goes into learning languages is immense. If we were able to learn one syntax, nearly identical to English, that could convert instructions into readable code, we'd enter a renaissance of programming akin to art after the photograph was invented, or the current renaissance of music we've created with the invention of the synthesizer and sampler. Skill would evaporate, ideas would reign. People would complain that proper rules aren't being followed like they always do, but the amount of programs produced would expand so far that the cream would rise to the top and the world would be a better place.