In an era of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, the age-old dream of a universal language, contemplated by thinkers from Dante to Sylvia Pankhurst, has found a new and vibrant home.Yet far from fostering international harmony, real-time speech-to-speech translation tech risks tearing society apart. Philip Seargant explores why the dream of transcending the curse of Babel persists so doggedly, and how it might lead the modern world into a dark future.

A decade after the end of the First World War, the social rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst wrote a short book outlining her recipe for a brighter future for humankind. A key ingredient, she argued, was a universal language. According to Pankhurst, the existence of a single world language would

play its part in the making of the future, in which the peoples of the world shall be one people: a people cultured and kind, and civilized beyond today’s conception, speaking a common language, bound by common interests, when the wars of class and of nations shall be no more.