Inhabiting Babel, A Manifesto for Responsible Meaning Engineering

Inhabiting Babel, A Manifesto for Responsible Meaning Engineering is a book written by Nicolas Figay.

This book is very practical and easy for a motivated business professional to read. For me, this book has both tempered my expectations as to what is possible and also reassured me of the real possibilities that exist if you do the required work.

Accountants and auditors tend to be on the conservative side of the spectrum.  Me included. I am  actually rather conservative in terms of what technology might bring to the table for accounting, reporting, audit, and analysis. I have learned how to "cut the cards" when dealing with sales people and software vendors.

What this book does is bring the wisdom from the experiences of an expert in system interoperability, enterprise architectures, and complex systems to helps motivated business professionals and technical professionals that truly want to understand artificial intelligence, cutting through the rhetoric and hype.

This book has enlightened me and convinced me to change my mind about certain things but also confirmed other things.  The book is a rather short 50 or so  pages; here is the outline of the nine chapters from the book so that you can see how readable the book is:

  • Chapter 1 — For a Meaning Engineering in Heterogeneous Socio-Technical Systems; Sets the general framework and diagnosis: the contemporary crisis of semantics is a crisis of level confusion, not a technological deficit.
  • Chapter 2 — Worlds and Their Ontological Statuses; Introduces a clear cartography of worlds (physical, social, logical, digital) and shows why they are neither continuous nor reducible to one another.
  • Chapter 3 — Decomposition, Composition, and the Illusion of Continuity; Demonstrates that decomposition is neither neutral nor transitive, and that confusing physical parts, logical components, and organizational roles leads to incoherent architectures.
  • Chapter 4 — Ontologies: Formalization, Not Revelation; Clarifies the real status of ontologies as situated formalisms carrying ontological commitments, not as objective descriptions of the world.
  • Chapter 5 — Knowledge Graphs: Between Structure, Assertion, and Interpretation; Analyzes graphs as artifacts of assertion and mediation, showing why they do not “contain” knowledge or meaning.
  • Chapter 6 — Interoperability: Translating Without Reducing; Overturns the naive vision of interoperability and proposes translation, mediation, and acceptance of gaps as structuring principles.
  • Chapter 7 — AI and Language: Semantics Without the World; Demystifies language models, showing that they stabilize linguistic usage without ontological commitment to the world.
  • Chapter 8 — Governing Meaning; Addresses issues of responsibility, traceability, and power related to semantic choices in socio-technical systems.
  • Chapter 9 — Toward a Federative Framework: Inhabiting Babel Rather Than Destroying It; Proposes a constructive conclusion: a federative framework for organizing the plurality of worlds without seeking to unify them artificially.
Fundamentally, what I got from the book is that artificial intelligence can, and will, be quite useful if you understand how to tame the beast.  Artificial intelligence does not work via magic; it works by good engineering. Within boundaries, within a specific defined context, and for well defined and specific purposes; artificial intelligence can look like it is performing magic.  But the reality is that behind what looks like magic is excellent process engineering.

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