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Showing posts with the label “Noam Chomsky”

Parochialism: Why Even Liberal-Leftist US Voters Are America Firsters

“For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party's policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people. The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the ‘lesser evil’  and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.” Indeed. Even Noam Chomsky believed (probably still believes) in the ‘lesser evil’ dogma. He advocated a vote to John Kerry in 2004. Massad rightly calls such a dogma a myth and parochialism. Frantz Fanon, however, “ understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists o...

The Silicon-Tongued Devil

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...