In the 17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a machine that could calculate ideas

Leibniz is definitely an interesting person. I studied about him in philosophy, but in grad school I focused more on his contribution to the ideas of computers. Leibniz and Pascal is a good starting point in history.

You can say that about almost any mathematician in history.

I kept assembling points I wanted to make in the comments, and then the article would cover them itself, so I'll just quote it:

> He imagined that this machine, which he called “the great instrument of reason,” would be able to answer all questions and resolve all intellectual debate. “When there are disputes among persons,” he wrote, “we can simply say, ‘Let us calculate,’ and without further ado, see who is right.”

> But as today’s data scientists devise ever-better algorithms for natural language processing, they’re having debates that echo the ideas of Leibniz and Swift: Even if you can create a formal system to generate human-seeming language, can you give it the ability to understand what it’s saying?

This is the important part. Having the naivete to assume that a flawed mechanical system represents the whole of Truth, is worse than having no system at all.

> flawed mechanical system

I don't like what "mechanical" is implying here, it gives the impression that humans have weird magic in their head that makes them understand language or search for truth (whatever approximate version they like anyway).

It's just a flawed system, period. Your brain circuits are a flawed system, and the artifacts produced by the data science craze are flawed. They are not flawed equally, but they are all physical infromation processing systems trying to make sense of the weird jumble of signals coming to it from Outside.

What about the other 4 billion years?