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The Word Made Lifeless. Are we becoming stochastic parrots?

The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we’ve all been cast as extras.

The charge of unseriousness applies to those whose language has religious roots—who talk, say, about the Word made flesh, or who have stopped quoting the Bible yet still retain the quasi-religious idea that human beings have a special importance unequaled by the other animals. Socrates claims that, because it was devised by beginning with a fixed conclusion and working backwards to premises that lend support to it, Lysias’s speech lacks the special sort of organic unity possessed by a living thing. If logos were a purely instrumental power, meant for the efficient securing of worldly ends, it would make perfect sense to delegate our thinking and writing to the new generation of LLMs and to train our students to do likewise.

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