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Code Talkers

Ռոշանակ (Roshanak)

The other day, I was asking myself how to prevent Artificial Intelligence from taking away human independence.
Old generations will recall the scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" where HAL 9000 says "I could see your lips move". That AI acquires self-defense function which blocks intervention by human being trying to nullify AI's runaway would be a frightening scenario...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDLgEEitJBE

I somehow come up with an exorbitant idea to keep an extremely remote language which is not known by Artificial Intelligence hidden from AI such as Burushaski, a language isolate, spoken by the Burusho people, who predominantly reside in northern Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan.

"Language of the Himalayas" (George van Driem)
"Language of the Himalayas" (George van Driem)

And it brought back memories about Navajo Code Talkers. In the following, I will not talk about AI anymore.

When I first learned about "Navajo Code Talkers", I found it so mind-boggling.
It was when I came across "Windtalkers", a 2002 American war film, which is hardly a success:

It's not my intention to review the film, but I wish to shed light on Navajo Code Talkers.

The following video by Pritzker Military Museum & Library is succinct but very informative:

Here is an excerpt from article "Code Talkers Were America’s Secret Weapon in World War II"
https://www.neh.gov/article/code-talkers-were-americas-secret-weapon-world-war-ii

The “day of infamy” arrived on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. News of the Japanese attack came by radio from President Roosevelt to many parts of the Navajo Nation homeland in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. The attack set in motion the United States’s entry into World War II and moved young Diné men to enlist, though some were still in high school and underage, including my father, Benson Tohe, who signed up with the consent of his parents. They came from rural backgrounds and military-style boarding schools that had already prepared them to live the harsh life of soldiers. Committed to helping Nahasdzáán, Mother Earth, and the United States, they joined the Marines and were selected to become code talkers, not knowing they would be tasked with developing and using the Navajo language as a secret weapon.

The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities

On this theme of Navajo Code Talkers, Kenji Kawano, a Japanese photographer, must be mentioned.

Kenji Kawano from "The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities"

An article on Arizona Republic on 13th August 2021 features Kenji Kawano.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2021/08/13/how-photographer-kenji-kawano-documented-lives-navajo-code-talkers/5544381001/

Kenji Kawano came to the Navajo Nation in 1974 with a plan to take some pictures of everyday life for Navajo people and then head back home to Japan.
He didn't know anything about Native Americans or the Navajo people and he couldn't speak English or Navajo, so it was hard for him to start taking photos.
But he didn't feel like he was far from home. Kawano said he was surprised at how similar Navajo and Japanese people look, especially the kids. That made him feel more at ease within the community.
Nearly 50 years later, he's still taking photos on Navajo land.

Arizona Republic on 13th August 2021

In cryptology, ECDLP (Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem) is very famous. Simply put,

V. Elliptic Curves over Finite Fields in "The Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves" (Joseph H. Silverman)

I had studied elliptic curves as mentioned in the following article:

Until I learned about the Navajo Code Talkers, I had no idea that an actual language would be used for encryption.

Later I studied cryptology in general, and I bought a book "CODES, CIPHERS, SECRETS AND CRYPTIC COMMUNICATION" by Fred. B. Wrixon, in which I found descriptions of Choctaw "Codetalkers" and Native American "Codetalkers":

CODES, CIPHERS, SECRETS AND CRYPTIC COMMUNICATION (Fred B. Wrixon)
From "CODES" by Fred. B. Wrixon

Footnote

Diné

The Navajo are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
The Navajo are speakers of a Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language which they call Diné bizaad. The term Navajo comes from Spanish missionaries and historians who referred to the Pueblo Indians through this term, although they referred to themselves as the Diné, meaning '(the) people'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo

Nahasdzáán

The English meaning of the Navajo word nahasdzáán is the world, or the earth.
Looking closer at the word, you’ll notice asdzáán, which takes on the meaning of woman, or female.
In this sense, the earth is being referred to as taking on a motherly role, nurturing life and helping it develop.

https://navajowotd.com/word/nahasdzaan/

When looking into Wikipedia for "Earth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth, change the language to Navajo (ISO 639-1 language code "nv"), one will find Nahasdzáán described in Navajo.

Some posts in X (Twitter) on Code Talkers

Closing

I am fully aware that this article does not address the original question of how to achieve human independence from Artificial Intelligence.

Credit for the header image: Navajo Code Talkers - The Unwritten Record

P.S. On the theme of cryptology, I'm inclined to write another article relative to "Type B Cipher Machine", codenamed Purple by the United States, for which Genevieve Marie Grotjan Feinstein, an American mathematician and cryptanalyst, played an important role in decipher.

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