Dr. Jens Limhurst took off his Emersio goggles and looked at the sequence of nine simple and commonly used emojis on the screen in front of him.

He had followed a hunch ever since he got his hands on a pair of AI powered Emersio goggles from one of Dubai’s hottest start-ups. Today it looked like the hunch was correct. Limhurst glanced over at the second screen where a two-page story was displayed, telling a tale about how a nice chap went mad over a girl. He donned the Emersios, shuffled the emojis around, and saw a new two-page story develop. This one spoke about how food and drinks could lead you into foolish actions. Next, he changed viewpoint and told the AI to use his research assistant’s context instead of his own. The two sequences of emojis now told two completely different stories.

The hypothesis Limhurst had worked on was that a picture says more than a thousand words and the story it tells depends on the image’s position relative to other pictures. Analyzing this without Emersio’s AI had been impossible, but now, with the enormous amount of data processing power available, he was about to crack it.

However, the last experiment showed something much more complex; the context of the reader determined what story the images told. No wonder teenagers seemed to be able to communicate with a jumble of emojis and slang that no adult could decipher!

Limhurst took off the Emersios again and looked up at a picture of the Temple of Edfu hanging on the wall. It was covered in hieroglyphs. “Could it be,” he thought, “that the hieroglyphs aren’t simple pictographic language, but actually a very advanced and data dense language that only AI can read?” As he quickly fed the AI model with a database of every known hieroglyph his pulse quickened. “I wonder what it will tell me?”

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Could intelligent machines use pictograms to encode and decode their own special language? Can AI systems be harnessed to transform our understanding of modern society, and unlock secrets of ancient civilizations? To explore the business opportunities this scenario might present, feel free to contact Research and Insights leader Adam Parsons or Mindbullets editor Doug Vining.