That's an amazing history and I'll include llull in my "History of AI/LLM" lecture! Thanks!

It seems like the real underlying problem is the "publish or perish" syndrome, where the value of a researcher is based on how many papers they write, or how often they're reference.

So there's a proliferation of papers, many of which are meaningless, and which no one has time to actually read, being referenced in other papers by other researchers who don't have time to read and evaluate all these other papers.

as a scientist, you are surely aware of bias

such as the bias on social media, where if AI does something bad, it gets widely disseminated (goes viral)

whereas if AI does something good, no one talks about it

also,
PSA
when I was a baby PhD student in 1985, my teachers warned me over and over, don't trust something just cause it is published in a peer reviewed journal
be careful of all that you read !!!!!

Once we are dependent on mere employees, the quality of care goes way down, and mistakes get made, or our treatment is just ineffective.

That's something the government does every few years already. Nothing new.

This is a rerun of the Sokal Hoax.

Sokal affair - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

Like some here, some folks thought the Sokal hoax was ethically problematic, but the postmodernists needed a wake up call, as do the LLM fans.

Really: the LLM idea is the stupidest* thing to come out of Computer Science ever. We need to be embarrassed.

*: Unnecessary explanation: the idea that random text generation has something to do with intelligence is really really stupid.

The obvious end goal of AI is centralized control of information that can be used to bend public opinion, win elections for pedophiles, criminals and set trends.

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

(cybernews.com)

We have a whole module on how to cite and also how AI works (ethics, errors, foundational knowledge, all that) for our freshman public health students. We STILL had over 10% academic affairs referrals for using hidden prompts and hallucinated citations and that's with a requirement that they give us annotated PDF copies of every cited paper.

Johnathan Swift described The Machine (for writing) in 1726; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine

Google, if Gemini is as useful as you hope it will be, it is inevitable that it will just come to be known as "Google" and AI answers to direct questions is just a feature of Google search.

Google, if Gemini is unreliable and can not be reliable, why are you letting it tarnish your brand?

Some do it, DELIBERATELY with a lot of other subjects too. AI is amoral especially if the material it is fed is amoral and we know a lot of those tech guys and politicians ARE amoral.