Our Future Arrived: Diffusion of Human-Machine Communication and Transformation of the World for the Post-Pandemic Era

The world is getting into a new phase in history. For the first time, humans are verbally communicating and developing meaningful relationships with non-living objects. AI is a wormhole to open a gateway to the new world, and the COVID-19 pandemic prepared the world to transform its system to be an open system that responds to, communicates with, and utilizes the remnants coming out of the wormhole of the new world. Now, we urgently need to create a holistic discourse on how we can recognize, develop, or shape the identities of communicable machines as people develop a partnership with them. Based on the emerging questions and discourses about human-machine communication, this special issue strives to investigate the present and future of advanced human-machine communication.