Applied natural-language-processing work is motivated by the proposition that it's more practical to teach a few computers to understand human languages than it is to teach a lot of people (including every new one) to speak computer languages. The potential advantage, thus, is numeric and large.  

So far, though, many people have learned to speak computer languages pretty well, and no computers have learned to understand human languages. Indeed, at this point it's still faster to teach computer languages to humans even if you have to create the humans from scratch first...