This presentation will cover how natural language processing and distributed human computing help improve the lives of speakers of all the world's languages, in applications including education, disaster-response, health and access to employment. When applying natural language processing to the full diversity of the world's communications, we need to go beyond simple keyword analysis and implement complex technologies that require human-in-the-loop processing to ensure usable accuracy. I will give examples from recent work where more than a million human judgments were collected on unstructured text and imagery data around natural disasters - the largest application of its kind by an order of magnitude. The observations debunk some of the over-optimistic claims about the utility of social media following disasters. On the positive side, I will share results that show how for-profit technologies are improving people's lives by providing sustainable economic growth opportunities when they support more languages, aligning business objectives with global diversity.