Tomoko:

They not only learn what Japanese people do, but they try understand how Japanese people perceive that from their own lens, cultural lens. And that kind of discussions, that kind of explorations have to be more empathetic.

Mauro:

What I want to emphasis here is that when it comes to understanding the role of language, which I think is something that I think today, everybody who teaches languages completely adheres to, is that it's not just the language, how to communicate, how to say thank you, how to give directions as to getting to the station or whatever, it's language in context.

Tomoko:

Remember you need to learn the most frequently used vocabulary for certain tests and things like that. So that was training. But we're now talking about language education that we have in upper or higher education or high school in the school system. It's not the language training and language education. I think that's a different part of that.

Grant:

The global Corona virus pandemic put a halt to most international travel. By April of last year, airline travel was down to levels not seen since the 1970s. The cross-cultural chatter of air cabins headed to international airports was ominously muted. But only temporarily.

Grant:

The pandemic is a demonstration of just how interconnected our lives are. Beyond the constrains of the pandemic, it's a time when crossing cultures can entail small talk in the airport lounge, a business meeting on Zoom, or a simple browse through the foreign language category on Netflix.

Grant:

Yes, we encounter other cultures all the time, whether we realize it or not. Navigating those encounters and engaging with genuine understanding, whether in business settings or personal ones, will increasingly become a point of interest.

Grant:

Today, we chat about cross-cultural communication with Tomoko Takami, director of Penn's Japanese Language Program in the School of Arts and Sciences, and Mauro Guillen, professor of International Management in The Wharton's School, and formerly the director of the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies.

Grant:

All right, well thanks to everybody for joining today. Welcome to the Understand This podcast, part of Penn Today. I thought we'd just start with introductions. Tomoko, do you want to go first?

Tomoko:

Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having me today. So my name is Tomoko Takami. I am the director of Modern Japanese Language Program and senior lecturer in foreign languages, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. I have been teaching Japanese language courses through Penn since 1996. And I have been teaching all levels of Japanese courses, but in recent years mainly intermediate and advanced level Japanese courses. I also teach Japanese for the Professions courses. These are the intermediate, first advanced level of business Japanese courses for students who'd like to learn Japanese for professional purposes.

Tomoko:

And let me talk a little bit about my personal background too. I was born and grew up in Japan, and moved the United States in 1994 to study at the Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania. So all my life in the United States for the past 26 years, I feel so old, but yeah, for 26 years or so, I've been living in the greater Philadelphia area and studying and working at Penn. Still now, I'm learning to speak English. My English is far from perfect, but I'm trying. And learning about cross-cultural communication in my every day life.

Tomoko:

So thank you for having me today, I'm so excited to be here.

Grant:

Yeah, you're a living example of cross-cultural communication. You work every day.

Tomoko:

I'm a learner, yeah.

Grant:

Mauro, how about you?

Mauro:

I'm Mauro Guillen, I'm a professor of The Wharton School and with also secondary appointments in the Department of Sociology and in the School of Education at Penn. I do research on globalization. I do research on how the world is changing, I think beyond recognition and will continue to do so for the next few years. I'm from Spain originally, but I've lived here in the United States for the last 33 or 34 years, and I've been at Penn for 25 years now.

Mauro:

And I think it's also perhaps relevant for me to mention that I was a director of the Lauder Institute for 12 years, until a couple of years ago. And as you know, this is a program that combines the Wharton MBA degree for the law schools, RJD, with a Master of Arts in International Studies, which includes, as one of the requirements, a study of foreign language.

Grant:

Yeah, and so with the Lauder Institute, can you maybe talk a little bit about how cross-cultural communication really plays into that program?

Mauro:

Well that program is built on the premise that business doesn't unfold in exactly the same way in different parts of the world. In other words, that there are some fundamental principles of business that are universal, but that really in practice, when you are making something, selling something, when you are interacting with customers, when you're interacting with investors or with regulators, that always happens in context. And therefore understanding that context is really important, and I'm sure we're going to get into this later, but one very important aspect of the shedding in a particular country in world, is the culture, and a key ingredient in any culture is the language.

Mauro:

So that's how, and you know the Lauder program essentially tries to cover all of those different layers of meaning that make the situation on the ground very different in different parts of the world. The same way that it makes it different even in the United States. I mean Pennsylvania's not the same as Texas, or Wyoming is not the same as Florida.

Mauro:

So, in other words, the program is all about helping the students become better at managing in their daily lives all of those different layers of culture and language.

Grant:

Do a lot of students tend to have a background in language?

Mauro:

Yes, it is actually a requirement. So they either have to, while they're on the program, reach the proficient level in a target language, or they have to come in with knowledge of at least one language besides English. Now, in practice, more than half of the Lauder students speak several languages, but it's not required that they speak already several languages, but it just so happens that the program tends to attract students with extensive knowledge of different languages.

Grant:

So I think a good place to start is a simple explanation of cross-cultural communication is, people from different cultural backgrounds communicating with one another, or understanding, trying to do that effectively. So whether through business or some other exchange, so I guess I want to know how you both perceive it today. Even if you maybe want to lift an example. What is an example of cross-cultural communication situation?

Mauro:

Tomoko, why don't you go first?

Tomoko:

This was communication situation. Yeah, I think it's random. Your explanation is pretty accurate. I think cross-cultural communication requires people who, not only aware of cross-cultural differences, but also hold soft skills, such as the communication skill, collaboration skill, like the critical thinking program problem solving skills, empathy, flexibility and that of stability. It's a core package of being a better individual who can function well in a multilingual, multicultural community here at home and worldwide.

Grant:

Yeah, and I know in your discipline you talk about a 21st century language learner and there's a specific meaning behind that, that is here to support a globalized society, so can you tease that out?

Tomoko:

Yeah. The language education has dramatically evolved in the past 20 years. If you took language 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and that sort of things that you are thinking, it's totally different now. So language education has more expanded and newer educational missions. And in 1999 standards were put in language learning in 21st century, that's what we call national standards, were published and their revised and expanded version were published too. So national standards emphasized that we need to help learners develop competence to communicate effectively and participate in multilingual communities at home and worldwide. And I want to quote a passage from that, because that really tells you what the language education is aiming for right now.

Tomoko:

So quote, "Language education not only contributes to student career and college readiness, it also helps to develop the individual as language learners take on a new and more invigorating view of the world. They come to understand the world better, because of their knowledge of speakers of another language, of people who share many of the same hopes and dreams for their future. While perspectives may differ among speakers of different languages, more similarities exist than we might imagine. However, it is only through knowing the language of others that we can truly understand how they view the world. And it is what makes the language students of 21st century good learners."

Tomoko:

So we consider the language learning and the culture a big 21st century skill. Also, we try to integrate other soft skills, we call it 21st century skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication skills, cross-cultural skills and things like that, into the language curriculum.

Grant:

Yeah, I can take away from that, to me it's empathy. This sort of need to understand somebody else's viewpoint.

Tomoko:

Exactly. My students often say, they not only learn, because I teach Japanese, they not only learn what Japanese people do, but they try to understand how Japanese people perceive that for their own lens, cultural lens. And that kind of discussions, that kind of explorations help them be more empathetic. Empathetic? Yeah. To raise their empathy, yes.

Grant:

Yeah. So mention that this pivot happened about 20 years ago. Was there a trigger in particular? And maybe Mauro you have some insight on that too.

Mauro:

I think speaking from the perspective of how work is being done these days, not just at companies but inside the government, at universities, at non-profit organizations, I think Tomoko put her finger on something that is really important, which is collaboration. Work used to be very much an individual affair, and especially office work. And now increasingly what we're seeing is team-based work. This is something that has become, I think by this time the year 2021, a very prevalent way of working.

Mauro:

And so what you find is, that you have in these teams, where people are collaborating to get things done within organizations, people come in from different cultures. Or teams using technology, for example, to bring together members of that team who are located in different parts of the world.

Mauro:

And I know that most of the people who would be listening might be wondering, well in those situations, what is the language that is used that everybody can understand? And that language oftentimes may be English, although not always. And what I want to emphasize here is that, when it comes to understanding the role of language, which I think is something that I think today, everybody who teaches languages completely adheres to, is that it's not just the language, how to communicate, how to say thank you, how to give directions as to getting to the station or whatever, it's language in context.

Mauro:

And what that means is that, even if you're having on a team six or seven people collaborating and they all have a different mother tongue, they're using English as the common language, but they bring different cultural perspectives to what they're doing. And those cultural perspectives may have to do with, for example, issues such as deference to authority. So we know that in some culture there's more deference to authority than in others. Also about time orientations. In some cultures maybe it's perfectly okay to begin a meeting a minute late. In others, it's not. In some cultures people try to arrive at a decision by building consensus, whereas in other cultures, maybe what you do is you take a vote. Or you wait to see what the most senior person in the room says and then that's what gets done. Or, in some cultures, they're focused on the short-term, others are more long-term oriented.

Mauro:

So there're so many dimensions to this and there's a lot of research to this. The point, I think, these days of language instruction, language education, language learning, is to understand not only how to pronounce words, how the syntax works, how to acquire as much vocabulary as possible, it's also understanding what's behind the use of those different languages from a cultural perspective.

Mauro:

And so, in studying French, can I at least try to think like somebody from France thinks? Or if I'm studying Chinese, Mandarin, can I put myself in the shoes of someone from that culture? Because communication, at the end of the day, is not just about the technical aspect of the language, it's also about understanding the other person you're communicating with. Because otherwise, as you know, and there are all of these hilarious examples out there, you get into a lot of cultural misunderstandings. And of course, if you have people working on a team together to accomplish something, and normally under a tight deadline and with limited resources, you don't want those cultural misunderstandings to become obstacles and to essentially derail the work of the team.

Mauro:

So I think it's really important to understand language and language acquisition or language learning these days in this broader context. Especially, as I saying, because now we have so many more people working in teams. And teams, they don't get the work done unless they are cohesive, unless people get along, unless people can communicate fluidly. Even if they're using a language that is common to all of them, let's say they're using English, but hey, when you're talking, even in English, to somebody who is from Japan or from China or from Brazil or from South Africa, what we want is our students to develop the sensitivity to be able to understand how that other person thinks.

Mauro:

So I think that is the kind of soft knowledge that we try to, I believe, in language classes now these days, we try to convey to our students.

Tomoko:

I absolutely agree, and that's something I'm still learning in cross-cultural communication in my every day life. It's not just about language, and I would like to give my own experience here. That was long time ago when I was here in the States, two years, three years, I was working as a translator. Very small job, translator for American company who has a business communication with a Japanese client. And the Japanese client was writing an email in Japanese, so I was there to translate those Japanese emails to English so American company will know what they're talking about.

Tomoko:

So Japanese company try the sample that American company made, and they emailed saying, "They tried a sample, but unfortunately they had a question about its effectiveness or validity, so they would like to think about it."

Tomoko:

So I understand Japanese. I translate that exactly how they say that. And American company said, "Okay, let us know. Please ask questions. We are happy to help."

Tomoko:

Boom, we emailed back to Japanese side. We didn't hear from them for a few weeks or months. We asked the email again, "Do you have any questions, we're happy to help." And they said the same thing, "Oh we still have a question. We have a question." And we went back and forth and back and forth. And you know what? That was the way of Japanese side saying, "No," in a very indirect way. And me being an amateur translator, I could translate the languages, but I didn't know how much cross-cultural differences should be into consideration how do I translate, I was not sure.

Tomoko:

So I felt responsible for taking that long time. American side, they're getting frustrated. I'm sure Japanese side was frustrated too, being sending and getting all the emails saying the same thing and yeah, just as Mauro said, it's not just about language, vocabulary, grammar especially, it's much more than that.

Grant:

Are translators usually asked to do that kind of interpretation in addition to the literal translation?

Tomoko:

I don't know. I think that the professional or very good one would do that. I was much newer back then, so I translated literal and I was kind of teasing the American side, maybe they're not into their [inaudible 00:20:44]. Now, if I'm doing the same the situation, I will more trying to talk about the cross-cultural differences to the American side. I may even pick up the phone and talk to the Japanese side, more on the phone, and then try to learn what they really mean. But at that time, I was just translating the literal things and then I thought I was doing a good job. But now when I think about that, I feel so responsible that I did not include those cross-cultural differences, different style. Japanese style is more indirect communication style, especially when they have a conflict. So I didn't put into the consideration for that translation job.

Grant:

[inaudible 00:21:31] you had listed some comparisons between American and Japanese culture and one notation is, of course as you just said, direct versus indirect, and I think another was formal versus informal and the other was high context versus a low context. So what does that mean?

Tomoko:

Yeah, the high context is, I think that's the concept that Edward Hall claimed, where basically in high context people rely on implicit and tacit communication. A lot of cultures where cultural information was shared unconsciously. Where in the low context, people rely on explicit, precise communication of meaning. And I hear, I mean, Japanese are more in the high context example, and Americans, compared with Japan, they're more in low context. And that's something I've seen as well, in the past, I guess, four, five years, I happened to have opportunity to be a kind of mediator between American colleagues and Japanese colleagues. Not at Penn though, not at Penn, we're happy together, so it's not up to [inaudible 00:22:59] at another place. And they're working on together something, and there are two situations that I came across.

Tomoko:

They're working together on something, Japanese people, basically the problem was, is the Japanese people, Japanese colleagues, do not fully share their opinions or explain things explicitly to the American Western culture colleagues. And then when I talk to the Japanese side, Japanese people said, they thought American colleagues understood what they're thinking, what they're saying and what they're doing already. So they thought their communication was successful. And then they didn't want to even bother, because the American colleagues were boss, in the higher status, which they try not to bother their boss, and things like that.

Tomoko:

However, the American colleague who was the boss, was that the amount and the way of the sharing information by Japanese colleagues was not enough. They even said they don't know what the Japanese colleagues were thinking, because they only get the minimum amount of information and contact, and sometimes they were not sure if Japanese colleagues were happy about this project. Are they enthusiastic about it? They were not even sure how the Japanese people were feeling.

Tomoko:

All I did as cultural sort of mediator was just to tell them what they told me to tell what the other side, the other way around, and just make sure to the Japanese side that, "Hey, you need to contact them more. You have to explain more, with justification or reasoning in everything." And the American side, I said, "Hey, if you have questions just let them know and don't feel bad to ask."

Grant:

So is it a concern at all that at some point as we increasingly educate people on cultural communication that we'll start trying to adapt to what they think the other side is doing? And they both end up doing that? You know what I mean?

Tomoko:

Yeah, I think it's a question of negotiation. I say that to people generalized story, but it's always, again, everything is in context. We don't know, Case A, something works out in Case A may not work out in the Case B, so it's always part of the context, and you have to make the best educational guess. But if you are learning in the cross-cultural communication you will see, it may not be personal but it may be the cross-cultural differences, or different ways of thinking, different ways of communication. You have the much more wider idea what can be possible and how you can resolve that problem.

Grant:

Wrote novelist, physician and activist, Khaled Hosseini, who himself carries identities from several countries and cultures, "If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, and to all rooms inside."

Grant:

What are some common observations that students have when they're trying to manage their business interactions with someone who's not from their culture? What are their pain points that you guys hear?

Mauro:

Well, I frequently hear that they don't understand why other people don't see the situation in the same way as they do. Or they cannot understand why they don't agree with them on some basic premises. For example, as I was telling you earlier, that it makes sense to, let's say, have a long-term plan as well as short-term plan. And I think a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of frictions and a lot of differences of opinion, stem from the issue of authority, and the issue of how people, when they have different positions in an organization are supposed to interact with one another.

Mauro:

And once again, I mean, cultures in the world, differ much, when it comes to that. So what is the right way of addressing a superior? What is the right way of dissenting from what somebody in a higher position of authority has said? And, by the way, I think that these are all issues that have become really important with the younger generation, because, as you know, societies are evolving. So it's not that France or Germany or Brazil or Japan or China are places that are fixed in time. We know, for example, that there's more informality today than there used to be. For example, about relationships between parents and children, or relationships at work between bosses and subordinates. So all of these things are evolving, but, of course, they evolve in different ways and at different speeds depending on the culture.

Mauro:

And so I hear a lot of students telling me, "Well, in this increasingly globalized world, in which maybe you're from Europe but you're working for an American firm and your customers are primarily from Asia, but your suppliers are mostly from Latin America, so how do you navigate that very complicated cultural map there on a daily basis, because you have to be facing that?"

Mauro:

And let me just make one point that I forgot to mention earlier about this particular problem that people always tell me it's difficult to deal with, which is that, I think one could make the case saying, "Well, if you have to interact with people from so many different cultures, then how in the world are you going to find the time to learn seven languages, so you can understand the culture behind each of those languages?" And the point that I want to make, I think, is really important.

Mauro:

I think it makes a big difference to go from only being able to speak and understand and write one language, to acquiring a second language. I think that change there is dramatic in terms of the consequences. Because it enables you to see the world from a second perspective that you didn't have before. Now from then on, instead of only being able to communicate or understand two languages, go to from two to three, or from three to four, or from four to five, that is obviously enriching, but it's not the same.

Mauro:

What I would say is that, even if somebody learns, let's say Italian, so a French person learns Italian, but then at work must always be dealing with people from Asia as customers or whatever. Well the side of that person understands the difference between France and Italy culturally, I think that person is better prepared to deal with Asians, although that culture has nothing to do with either Italy or France, than somebody who only knows and understands French culture. You see what I'm saying?

Mauro:

In other words, each language, each culture that you understand, I think makes you more effective and more sensitive to cultural variations, even if we're talking about a different culture. Because I think-

Grant:

[crosstalk 00:31:08]. Go ahead.

Mauro:

... there is a method, there is, I would say, an attitude that comes with learning a second language. And by the way, one thing that I also want to emphasize. Learning a foreign language from scratch is a humbling experience. It's very humbling. And I also remind students of that, and I say, actually, the humbling part of it, is really important, because you become a more humble human being in the sense that you understand that your culture is not the best in the world. Your culture is not the only one in the world. Your culture is not the one that should dominate. Or the way in which your culture says that things should be, is not the only way of doing things.

Mauro:

So it's humbling from that point of view. And I think that is extremely important in terms of the development of a young person. To be humble, and to understand that there's other ways of thinking about the world. There's other ways of communicating, there's other ways of interacting with people, there's other cultures. That's why I always say that, quoting from a famous political scientist, Martin Lipset, who was Canadian but mostly was active here in the United States, very famous political scientist, he says, "People who only know one country know no country."

Tomoko:

Oh wow.

Mauro:

That he said. And it's absolutely true. You don't know. So let's think about the reflective aspect here. You don't know that much about your own country, unless you start learning about another country, and then you can put your own country, your own culture, your own language, your own experience in perspective.

Mauro:

And that is really important, and that's why educationally, I continue to believe that it's extremely important to require all high school students, all college students, to learn another language. Even if it's just at the introductory level. So that they are humbled. Not just about the language and the way you use the different verbs or whatever, but also it's a humbling thing about understanding that there's other cultures. There's other ways of thinking, there're other ways of doing things in the world.

Grant:

And this is also a very solutions-oriented podcast, so I don't want to overlook that part of it, and you mentioned education. I guess my question is, what are the approaches that you two see to improving cross-cultural communication and language education? Is it getting to people earlier in their education careers?

Mauro:

I think any moment is good actually. I would even go as far as saying, which is what I'm arguing these days, that universities should start thinking about how you bring back to campus people in their 50s. Because now people are living for 80 years on average, and maybe you should be going to college more than once. Especially given that technology changes everything so quickly.

Mauro:

But what I'm trying to say here, there are so many ways, and I think that Tomoko as a practitioner of language acquisition, as somebody who works with the students very closely to help them and also designs programs, knows far better than I do. But from my perspective, I think the key thing is that if we move away from the idea that language learning is just about acquiring the language, again the syntax, vocabulary, how to communicate effectively, if you move away from that, and you put language in context, cultural context and of that, and it's all about that as opposed to just the language, then for me at least, as somebody who is not in that field, in terms of pitching languages, the pedological implication is that you have to immerse the student then.

Mauro:

And there are so many different ways in which you can immerse yourself. You can immerse yourself, of course, by listening to the language, through radio or television, or by taking a class in the language, by traveling to that country. There are so many other ways in which, I know, and Tomoko can probably provide more details, in which you can also enhance the students learning experience of a different culture, a different language.

Mauro:

But I think the keyword here is immersion. What I think has changed is, that we want the students to have an immersive experience, so that they understand the totality of what it means to learn Mandarin. It's not just about Mandarin the language, or about how it's written or this or that, it's about the broader history, culture, context, in that part of the world.

Grant:

Yeah, I mean, in terms of an immersion, technology has profoundly changed what we access to. I mean people who watch anime, or Spanish television, things that they can immerse themselves in that wouldn't have been available even 20 years ago.

Mauro:

Even video games, by the way. Thinking about the younger generation, I think video games.

Grant:

I think some are translated for multiple languages.

Mauro:

I think video games, but the video games also are designed by different companies in different parts of the world. I think that's another great way of immersing yourself in the culture. Because, at the end of the day, video games among so many other things, are cultural products, and they reveal the assumptions and the understanding behind each culture.

Mauro:

Again, I mean, I think one has to be creative these days because the span of attention of students has declined as their ability to get information and to interact with one another through technology has expanded. As teachers, we need to work much harder, I think, to capture their imagination.

Mauro:

And so, I think this is, in fact, congruent with this new vision that people like Tomoko have developed over the last years, in terms of teaching language or language learning in context, which I think is an extremely powerful idea.

Tomoko:

Yeah. I think these days, especially as you said Grant, in that, with technology, a lot of us are creating our own teaching materials using authentic material. Authentic material is movie, TV shows, news program and everything in the internet that are created for maybe teachers that train in language, so we use that in the classrooms to learn, not only in the language aspect but also that cultural and social aspect as well. And also another way of using technology is that, they allow us to contact people of the credit languages. So our students meet Japanese students and have conversation or conversation exchange from Japan and discuss something together. And yeah, language learning is not any more just learning the vocabulary and grammar to communicate, it's much more than that.

Grant:

Do you think there's sort of a misperception of what language is or how it's useful in society? Even just speaking about how it tends to be commercialized with apps like Duolingo and stuff like that.

Tomoko:

I was thinking about that, because my background before coming to the United States, I taught English in Japan at the English Conversation School, that's what we called in Japan. We tried to help people, Japanese people... well, it was in Japan, so we tried to help Japanese students to use English for communication or to a better score in the exam, for example. So I was speaking English there, and there it was a training, the English language training. Remember you need to learn the most frequently used vocabulary for certain tests and things like that. So, that was training. But we're now talking about language education that we have in upper or higher education, or high school in the school system. It's not the language training and language education. I think that's a different part of that.

Tomoko:

And again, when you said something online learning tool, is it the language education or language training? But it is, the difference is in there.

Grant:

Yeah, to engage with the context and not just syntax.

Tomoko:

Right. Yeah.

Grant:

Mauro, you had mentioned cross-cultural collaboration and teams. And that businesses are very, I guess, explicit about incorporating that. Is that something that we could be seeing more of as time goes on?

Mauro:

Oh no, absolutely. We're going to see, I think, more of that practice, of people working in teams. And I'm here referring to both manual workers and cognitive workers. But think about the following as a way to justify this prediction of mine. Knowledge is becoming increasingly collaborative. So new technologies, sometimes of course, built on just one discipline, maybe biology, or maybe chemistry. And you see, more and more frequently, what we're seeing is, that the new breakthroughs, the new advancements are interdisciplinary in nature. So we have physics and chemistry and engineering come together in the field of bioengineering, for example. And this is happening in science. This is happening in the humanities. This is happening in the practical world of business as well, where in the past you could just think about a marketing problem, or a finance problem, or an accounting problem, and now everything is becoming so much more integrated.

Mauro:

So yes, I do believe that in the future we're going to have even more jobs that require people to collaborate, to be able to work in teams. And that's why, some of the best research that we have out there on the evolution of jobs in the American economy shows very clearly, that over time it, is true that technical skills are in high demand in the market, but over time the kinds of skills that are required by employers, the ones that are really growing in terms of the demand from employers, are skills having to do with the ability to work in teams, with social skills, with the ability to negotiate. So all of the different kind of things that Tomoko and I have been talking about.

Mauro:

In other words that the successful worker of the future will be somebody who, yes, perhaps has some technical skills, which could be manual or could be cognitive or a combination of both, but also a worker that has social skills. And among those social skills you have, once again, communication skills, you have collaboration skills, you have negotiation skills. That's been really, really important for, I would say, up to perhaps even 50% or 60% of jobs, for example in the American economy let's say in five years from now. That's essentially what the statistics and what the projections indicate.

Grant:

What do people usually push back with, whenever they hear stuff like that? Because that probably unnerves a lot of folks.

Mauro:

Why? I don't see a lot of push back. Look, it's very clear that... Well, let me take it back. As we speak today, it is clear that we need airline pilots, we need surgeons, we need people who specialize in something and then it takes them 25 years of schooling to get there. And I say today, because quite frankly, given artificial intelligence and robotics, who knows? Maybe we won't need airline pilots. In fact, as you know, most of the aircraft these days can fly themselves. Maybe we won't need surgeons, because as you know, you have robotics that now perform certain types of surgeries, always supervised by a surgeon, but still. Maybe we won't need professors, because we will have machines. Who knows?

Mauro:

But what I'm trying to say is that, where the human being excels, where I don't think the human being is going to be replaced by computers, is with social skills. It's with these negotiation skills, communication skills, the ability to work in teams. And increasingly, that's where work is going. That's what the labor market is demanding.

Mauro:

So I disagree with many assumptions that I think people make. The other day there was, I think, a very, very revealing op-ed in the New York Times, I believe it was, about a parent from India, who was saying, "Look, in India every parent wants their children to start being able to code at age five, to write computer code." And he was saying, "Well, I mean, I'm not sure that should be the priority. Maybe math or reading or learning another language at age five should be the priority. But the point is that, why are we training so many coders? Why are we insisting so much on that when that is going to be the first thing that gets automated. I mean, the machines are going to be able to program themselves before we know it. That is what artificial intelligence will be very good at. We're going to need, probably, many fewer coders than, let's say, humanities graduates. And think about the ethical problems that we have these days with income inequality, with political turmoil, with racial tensions and so on and so forth.

Mauro:

I don't want to be too provocative here, but I think that we have fundamentally misunderstood what the labor market of the future is going to demand. And I think the emphasis right now, when I hear for example that at Princeton the most popular major is computer science, I'm worried. I'm not worried about the fact that then fewer people are majoring in history or taking languages. I'm worried about those people who are majoring in computer science, and I'm thinking, I'm not sure all of them are going to have the kinds of jobs that they think they're going to have. Not tomorrow, but let's say in 10 years from now.

Grant:

There's also communications with the AI subject. Is there any kind of concern over how that gets incorporated and built into AI? Are we going to have AI machine learning that takes into account cultural context?

Mauro:

Well perhaps. I'm not an expert on AI, but certainly these days you can now use your phone, and if Tomoko is speaking in Japanese I can maybe use my phone to get a real time translation. It's not going to be good, but what that real time translation doesn't give you is the context, doesn't give you the body language that Tomoko is using. It doesn't give me an understanding of if they're speaking Japanese, [inaudible 00:47:26] is there wisdom in Japanese culture. It doesn't give me a sense of why Japanese companies are so good at making product better, easier to use, cheaper, those sorts of things. It doesn't give me that. It gives me translation, but that's about it.

Grant:

All right. So I guess, just thinking big picture, what gives you guys hope, in that we are making strides to being a more connected and thoughtful global society?

Mauro:

I mean, let me just say something really simple here, which is that, as you know, I think we have a deficit in terms of global understanding these days. And there's increasingly, I think, this tendency in the world to turn inwards, not outwards. And that's where, again, I want to invoke the humbling aspect of learning a language and the culture associated with it. Which is that it opens your eyes to something else. And that's why I think, to the extent that universities such as Penn promote the study of language and encourage its students to pursue the study of language, I think you're considering to making better global citizens. And I think that extremely important. Even if that student doesn't want to travel, doesn't want to live in another country, wants to stay in the United States and work here for their entire career, that's fine. But we would be educating better people, I think, if we open their minds to all of these new horizons that you see when you learn another language, and the culture associated within.

Grant:

[Scaffolding 00:49:26] right?

Mauro:

Yeah, it's a form of mental gymnastics, if you want to put it that way. It just helps develop parts of your brain that have to do with empathy, as you said at the beginning. With understanding other people. With being able to reach, so above and beyond the practical benefits, I think. And there are many practical benefits to learning another language. I think you're more effective at working in teams and all of these things that I was mentioning.

Mauro:

There's also, I think, we wouldn't be making of helping educate better people, and that's really important.

Tomoko:

Yeah, and as a language educator myself, that mission really become a vital part for me to teach language skill and then the amazing thing about Penn, which I really love is that, we have students from all different parts of the world. So in the classroom we have, not only American students, but from Asia, from Europe and Australia, from Russia, all kinds of students. So I really hope that, well for me, through language education and teaching cross-cultural communication, I hope that the students will be better citizens worldwide.

Grant:

Thanks to listening to Understand This, a production of the Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. We hope you'll join us again next time for another interdisciplinary conversation between Penn experts. To be notified of future episodes, subscribe to Understand This. For your preferred streaming platform, follow Penn Today on social media.