Series: Toward a Shared Language Between Humans and Machines Part 1/4: Why Machines Still Struggle to Understand Us

Language models give the impression of conversing with us as if they really understood. But behind this fluency lies an illusion: machines share neither our experiences nor our intentions. This article explores the fundamental barriers that prevent any genuine mutual understanding: the absence of lived experience, the absence of a world, and the radical difference in how reasoning works. Anyone who has ever translated between two human languages can’t help but notice that the task is quite complex, even when mastering both languages perfectly. Language holds many subtleties and ambiguities, unspoken meanings, and things that are simply untranslatable from one language to another. These difficulties often have their roots in cultural grounding as well as in lived experience, frames of thought that shape languages.