Humans have enough trouble understanding human language, especially in textual form. Context, body language, facial expression, shared experiences, cultural memes, power relationships, and internal motivations all play a role in how lanugage must be interpreted. Ambiguity, emotion, connotation, and double-meanings all play critical roles. It's highly unlikely (I would say impossible) that computers can ever be made to fully understand human language.<p>To the extent that humans and computers are able to communicate with each other, it will be via a cooperatively developed human-computer language that will be influenced as much by the computers as by the humans.<p>That shared compromise is true today via programming languages and the stilted way we must interact with Google Voice Search and Siri. And while those contours will change over the forthcoming decades, it will continue to be true for all time.<p>As humans augment themselves with digital computing power and as computer technology itself evolves, things will become very different, but the fundamental disconnect will always be there.