This is the Babel fish we've been waiting for
Networked Thought and Learning
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This is the Babel fish we've been waiting for<br>How AI lets us find, follow and join conversations in languages we don’t speak<br>Aug 21, 2026
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Arvamusfestival at Orulava in Paide, 2014. Photo: Alari Rammo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Unmodified.<br>A few weeks ago, I was sitting with my friend Lage under a tent in the ruins of a medieval castle in Paide, listening to Estonian entrepreneurs and officials talk about “building the agentic state”, giving unique e-IDs to AI agents and allowing them to act for you in the very advanced IT infrastructure that Estonia has built up. There were perhaps fifty people in the audience, and the whole conversation was in Estonian.<br>Lage and I do not speak Estonian, so we were both looking at our phones, where English captions continuously appeared as the panelists were speaking. Every once in a while a small card would pop up explaining an organization or policy that everyone else in the tent already knew about. Someone said something funny, the audience laughed, and a few seconds later we laughed too.<br>That last part was really amazing. I have read plenty of translated summaries after a conference, but this was different — we could hear the hesitation in someone's voice, notice which claim woke up the room, and understand the joke while it was still funny.<br>The next day we got a chance to interview Linnar Viik, one of the people behind Estonia's original Tiger Leap programme to bring computers to Estonian schools five years after independence, in 1996 , and now involved in AI Leap to bring socratic AI into all Estonian schools. We had just heard him on another panel, where he compared the tiny team that built Skype with the much larger teams inside companies like Google. So I asked him whether Estonia's small size helped it move a bit like a startup.<br>I could ask that because I had understood something he said in Estonian fifteen minutes earlier. (Interview in English below, first few minutes are in Norwegian).<br>In the Norwegian podcast we recorded afterwards I called this science fiction. Lage said, “It's science fiction, and it was incredibly fun.” I still think that is right. But I have been thinking just as much about how we ended up under exactly that tent, knowing who Linnar was, with enough background to ask him anything useful — and why I was sitting on my sofa a week later watching Soviet citizens argue about the future of Estonia in 1988.<br>This is where I started thinking about Douglas Adams and the Babel fish. His fish sits in your ear and translates. What we had in Estonia felt a bit larger: help finding a conversation we did not know existed, enough background to have a clue what people were talking about, and then the translation when we got there.<br>How do you prepare for a country you know almost nothing about?
Lage is spearheading an ambitious local project called the AI-club1, an attempt at bringing creative youth together with professional artists, museum curators, writers and filmmakers, and exploring the boundaries of what happens when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence. We had a bit of funding and the idea that we needed to get out and learn from what others are doing, and a vague instinct that something interesting was happening in Estonia around education, digital government, AI and civic participation.<br>But we weren’t even sure Tallinn was the right location, what would be the best time, or a single idea for whom to talk to. I asked Claude to investigate a few possibilities, and it came back unusually definite: go to Tallinn in early August, then take the bus to Paide for Arvamusfestival, Estonia's annual festival of public debate.<br>From there it became a proper rabbit hole. Claude churned through Estonian news reports, government strategies, research papers, programme documents and blog posts. AI listened to Estonian podcasts and helped us identify episodes and people connected to the questions we cared about. We gradually made a map of the education ministry, HARNO, the e-Estonia Briefing Centre, AI Leap, youth participation organizations and some of the people who had been around since the first wave of digital government.<br>One of the best meetings did not come from any clever search. I suddenly remembered someone I had been in a language class with in Russia more than twenty years ago. We had not kept in touch, and I had no idea what she was doing now. It turned out that she was working at Estonia's Ministry of Education and Research, doing incredibly relevant work to our interests (so fun seeing someone whose paths you crossed many years ago, and seeing that they have similar values and interests to you, in a very different context).<br>We booked a private session at e-Estonia briefing center and a meeting at the Ministry of Education with two people working on exactly the educational technology questions that interested us. The research...