Chomsky and Kissinger, two greats of the twentieth century, grappling with ChatGPT

While radically different, they converge on their opinion of artificial intelligence. “Banality of evil”, for the linguist. The phenomenon “contrary to post-Enlightenment modernity”, according to the political scientist. Technological evolutions between new dreams and new problems

In the beginning it was the Enigma code, which Alan Turing was able to decipher, arousing the enthusiasm among scientists, after the war, of being one step away from deciphering the structures of every human language. In the 70s of the twentieth century the then “cybernetics” and the new theories of information believed they were one step away from the finish line. More or less the same years Noam Chomskythe father of generative linguistics, instead, he curbed enthusiasm by emphasizing, even then, the ineliminable difference between human and artificial intelligence: “The fact that all normal children acquire broadly comparable grammars of great complexity and with remarkable speed suggests that humans are somehow specially engineered, with a capacity of a mysterious nature.”