Babylon, best known for its desktop translation utility everybody used to use and almost nobody seems to have anymore, has a new online text translation tool on its website.

Babylon is not the first internet translation service. Alta Vista’s Babel Fish exists for the better part of a decade but it was bought by Yahoo and disappeared into obscurity like everything else Yahoo buys; Google has a pretty good service but nobody knows it exists. Babylon is exempt from this obscurity because its translation utility is just one arm of its sprawling translation services, spearheaded by its much more useful desktop on-click translation tool. And there’s a good reason for that: these mass-text translation services suck.

Sure, sometime you come across something someone wrote in a Russian blog about you, and you need some sense of what was written — is it a secret crush? Are you being mocked? In those cases, you don’t care how quick and dirty the translation is.

In every other case, these services suck too much to be useful. In fact, they’re the butt of jokes for years — freaky lost in translation games are a favorite pastime for geeks. And some use Babylon’s name as a derogative for bad translation.

Translation is a fine art of understanding context and bridging the sensibilities and sensitivities of two languages. It’s a work of intelligence, and artificial ones, for now, won’t do. We can teach them what hot dog means and how it differs from warm canines, but almost every word has different meanings and subtle shades of meaning and the same goes for the target language. Think about how many things “ass” means.

Okay, ready? Here it is this article translated to Hebrew with Babylon.

An upcoming article in Brain Research Magazine will prove the incredible — in the sense that it’s incredible that anyone has took the time to prove it. It seems that (a) you don’t drive as well when you’re talking on your cell phone; and, more incredibly*, (b) humans can’t multitask. Popular Science, which runs an article series called Science Confirms the Obvious, say that the Carnegie Mellon University study, conducted by fMRIing people while they were playing a driving simulator, shows listening reduces the ability to concentrate on driving by 37 percent. The lead investigator, Marcel Just, said that no matter how different two tasks are, “there’s only so much the brain can do at once”.

And yet, in defiance of this dazzling science, personal transportation has become more and more distracting as it advances. There’s only so much you could do on horse back. Maybe hum and play with the hilt of your sword. But radios, cellphone, GPSs and drive-throus, and more benign-looking, but as dangerous contraptions, such as rear-view makeup mirrors and seats for passengers, almost insure the road never gets those 37 percent of concentration. And that’s a shame: somewhere in those 37 lie the two or three percent you need to avoid running over a ten-year-old. And that’s just what distracts you on the inside of your car: more and more we learn how jamming the highways with huge, distracting billboards can rob us of our much-needed brain processing power.

I recently talked to Mario Gerla, a UCLA professor who works on a car-to-car computer network called CarTorrent. (Interview coming soon). If Gerla succeeds, we can add a file-sharing, video-playing computer to that list of distracting things we have in our cars. We were talking about the practical applications of CarTorrent and Gerla insisted he’d build his system so the driver can’t see the computer screens, or access the computers through special goggles which won’t require taking your eyes off the road. But even then you’d have more drivers searching for driving instructions or downloading movies for their kids, and who could blame them? Driving is boring. And if there’s one thing our weak mind can’t handle, that’s boredom.

I’m sure that CarTorrent is the future for cars: a robust network that can be used for everything from file sharing to navigation. I asked Gerla if it’s a bleak future for pedestrian ten-year-olds everywhere, or whether the tide would be stemmed and in the future we will see less and less interactive elements in our cars. The opposite, he said: “the future to me is in the driver not being the driver anymore, maybe a supervisor”. Using multi-point info gathering, systems such as CarTorrent would be able to drive our cars for us, and do it better than we ever would. That’s Gerla’s big dream: using accurate data from the net and lacking male egos, automatic cars would be tenfold more efficient at getting from point a to point b, and being computers, they would be absolutely better at preventing last-minute collisions.

This solves the too many distractions problem very neatly: “With the driving gone,” says Gerla, “we’d see more ways for you to entertain yourself on the way”. The big roadblock here is the car companies, who Gerla says are dead scared of liability suites. Solve this and there’s no reason for humans to drive anymore.

What’s interesting, and more than a little insulting, is how there’s no question we’d be so inferior to these driving computers. It’s not just that we’re easily distracted: these systems would react faster and more accurately to danger than even the most composed driver. They would do it just as elegantly while they’d be playing a movie for our kids, surfing the web for us and beating us at chess: computers can multitask fine. In the meanwhile, we’d be resigned to sit there and stare at the babes on the billboards.