When I tell people that the Vatican is going to use AI to provide simultaneous translation of the Pope’s talks into umpteen different languages, the reaction is always exactly the same:

“What could possibly go wrong?!”

Then I remember my father’s story, about one of the very early computing machines that was programmed to translate too and from another language— Japanese, as I recall. At a demonstration of this new wonder, someone challenged the machine to translate the English idiom, “out of sight, out of mind.” The machine cranked for a few seconds, and spat out a row of Japanese characters. Then someone said, “translate it back to English.” Another few seconds, and the result appeared: “invisible idiot.”