By Reverend Wayne Chu

When I was in the seminary, I was very excited to have the chance to study ancient languages. Through the study of the ancient civilizations, I want to have a better understanding of the cultural background of the Bible. Later, I learned that if anyone wanted to seriously study a Ph.D. in the Old Testament it was a requirement to learn all the ancient languages. This is actually quite a barrier. I remember reading the Akkadian language, a language that archeologists discovered thousands of clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. These tablets are written in a script called cuneiform. It looks like a different arrangement of fish bones. (Actually, it is likely that they used fish bones to represent different words at that time.) Only a few experts in the world can read and translate them. Therefore, as of today, most of them remain untranslated and inaccessible to the general public.

However, today I read a news about an AI system created using Google technology that can translate this ancient Akkadian language and it made me very excited. Although according to the expert, the output can’t reach a high confidence level and the system still makes many mistakes. As a result, we cannot trust the output. But at least, it is a great start, and positive example of using AI, a promising tool to save huge amounts of time and preserve the limited and valuable expertise we have today.

It gives us a glimpse of the future and the past. Many years ago, everyone rushed to learn how to program and becoming a programmer. But now, AI can program better than humans, so what is left for humans to do? We can be an AI trainer. Like this example, we can train AI to overcome the issue of the richness of the meaning in idioms, understand nonliteral language, and translate in the case of informal grammar. With the good use of technology, I believe we can know more about the past and more importantly, it can enrich our knowledge of the Bible.

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Habakkuk 2:14

Riverside Christian Alliance Church meets on Sundays at 10:30am and it’s located at 9640 Jurupa Road, Jurupa Valley CA 92509. You can reached them at 951-360-0113 or visit https://www.riversidecma.org/