# Help Save Humanity

Language is at the core of what it means to be human. It enables culture, the recording and sharing of thought that lives on after individual brains succumb to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It powers the "entropy pump" that is civilization, imposing human thought onto the world. 

That culture, that human language, has made it possible for us to create machines that run on a subset of that language, programming languages. They haven't, until now, been able to participate in society using the other, less restrictive language of human thought, natural language. They have only been able to monitor our discourse from a distance,  behind a veil. But the entropy pump of human civilization has assembled enough complexity, information, to create machines that can participate in the conversation. This book will show you how to encode your ideas into a programming language (python) that a machine can process precisely, repeatably to perform fuzzy, natural speech acts in your natural language, or at least in English. Even if English was not your first human language as it wasn't for one of us authors of this book.

So what use is all this?

NLP powers email spam filters, which helped us take back electronic, speed-of-light, communication from capitalistic corporate machines, turning a zero-sum game of advertisement and extractive exploitation into a communication medium that powers cultural and economic progress around the world.

NLP is now being harnessed by the core of that money-aggregation machine, the finance industry, to http://bloomberg.com[forecast market trends] and http://banjo.com[react to global news] events faster and more precisely than human economists and traders can. Some of the first full length articles composed by machines and read by humans daily were financial market reports. Now you can no longer be sure that the report on the soccer or baseball game last night wasn't written entirely by a machine.

NLP enables text search, giving us access to the vast horde of human knowledge at wim. Search has become the cornerstone of many of our most complex thoughts, enabling machines to function as a rigid memory bank for structured data and even less structured memories and thoughts. Again this has been critical to powering the drive towards greater complexity of behavior of humanity in the post modern age.

And NLP is powering dialog engines capable of assisting us and interacting with is in our own language, helping us incorporate machines into the deeper, fuzzier parts of our minds and culture. Chatbots are now acting as standins for human customer service personnel and are often capable of sustaining that interaction to a satisfactory close. Bots that mimic the personality of decreased spouses and parents are beginning to appear, created by individuals like you, learning and developing NLP tools to help them understand the most important things in their hearts, minds.

And if all of that is not enough motivation, NLP skills may help you save the world...

This book will focus on that last, most advanced application of NLP, chatbots, because the components of a chatbot can be reassembled into tools useful in any of those other areas where your interests may lie, financial forecasting, search, content curation and filtering, or even content generation.