Why does AI feel so different?

It feels deeply wrong to put Kahneman in the same list as Socrates, Aristotle, and Bacon.

This strikes me as babbling. 70 percent fever dream.

To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls.

I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doesn’t. On balance, any benefit is drowned out by the effort it takes me to check its work.

I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves, or who have crippling impostor syndrome.

The article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing. It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion. If we're talking about LLMs, let's call them LLMs.

And let's be real: we're in a bubble. There's zero evidence that LLMs have produced a measurable productivity boom. If anything, they're net negative in many contexts---encouraging shallow engagement, short-circuiting the learning process, and making knowledge workers more dependent on stochastic parrots that frequently hallucinate. We've replaced "look it up" with "ask the oracle," and the oracle can't reliably tell fact from fiction.

The hype cycle will keep burning cash until someone admits the emperor's wardrobe is ... speculative at best.

Exactly. The tech itself isn't driving the mission --- the funding model is. "AI" right now feels less like the internet in ’95 and more like crypto in 2021: massive hype, vague promises, and any social benefit is incidental to keeping the capital flywheel spinning.