I first heard about Babel from a YouTube video about Dark Academia books because at the time I had just finished The Secret History, and was engrossed in the genre. Piquing my interest, I decided to check out Babel, and I'm glad I did. The book carries themes such as coming of age, imperialism and oppression, and internal conflict.
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence is a about a boy, Robin who's taken in by Professor Lovell. He's taken from China to England where he's raised and expected to study the magic of silver bars, so he could make them. Robin faces abuse under Professor Lovell throughout the years, and when he's ready to attend Babel, a fictional school under Oxford. At the school, Robin befriends Rami, Victoire, and Letitia (Letty). He faces this internal conflict and eventually interpersonal conflict that has to do with where is loyalties lie - with the oppressive institution, or the oppressed.
I picked up on this after my first read through, but was able to see it more the second time - that, Robin's story is that of a coming of a age story. A coming age of story is a story in which the audience gets to experience the protagonists childhood development, or adolescent development along with the - navigate their identity, their relationships, attitudes, and beliefs about the world around them. Robin is taken to the England as a child, and so see part of his development throughout childhood, and mainly his development throughout his studies at Babel. Through this development, we learn along with Robin about the prestige of Babel, the wonder and awe of silver bars, Hermes, the underground society, and we learn along with Robin about how the magic and wonder of the silver bars is possible through the British Empire, and oppression.
Artificial Intelligence is thought of as black box - it computes information, but the way it computes that information, and why it outputs the information is it does isn't quite clearly known. In the fantastical world of Babel, combination of silver bars are used to make things, to manifest things, and this can be done through translating from other languages as well; however, translation could get lost when combining the silver bars - there's a semblance of black box there too. Under capitalism, exploitation is a given, so this holds true when it comes to conventional AI as a whole - the whole research side and exploitation of marginalized groups in academia; however, this massive emergence of large language models, turning the research of natural language processing into a commodity that's widely accessible has only exacerbated the exploitation of marginalized communities both on the academic side, and manufacturing side. The parallel with the silver bars can be reinforced with how the silver bars rely on language just as large language models do.
In a world that tells a story of imperialism and exploitation, the possibility to draw parallels to the real world are evergreen.