Is Google reversing the Tower of Babel edict?

Genesis 11:1-9 is one of the most interesting parts of the Bible because it gives insight into human ambition and the power of collective effort. It's worth reprinting here:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel-—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Today I read those smart Google people are perfecting automated language translation using the United Nation's collection of translated documents to train translation software. (Training software is something we all do when we tell our spell-checker to remember some word it previously did not know, for example.) According to the reporter, the translations produced are nearly perfect, including Arabic to English and Chinese to English translations. This is what Google engineering and research vice president Alan Eustace says about the effort:

"If we can make every piece of the Web, every document, accessible to everybody, that will contribute something to the world. And that's what this project is aimed at."

Here's some of the thoughts that passed through my mind when I read this:
1) Man, I should have bought Google stock when it was at $100.
2) Much of the technological development that has taken place in the last few decades is grounded in the same collectivism that drove the construction of the Tower of Babel. For example, increasing dependence on open standards in contrast to proprietary technology. People are building on each other's work, such as how Google uses previously available technologies in radically innovative ways.
3) Building the Tower of Babel also involved technological advances, such as new methods for making stronger bricks, new architectural design, and probably more advanced use of simple technologies like pulleys, levers, and wheels.
4) What will it mean when there are virtually no language or distance barriers to communication? Will it hasten spreading the gospel to all the world?

You can try some of Google's more primative automated translation tools here.