It is easy to recognize this name - Noam Chomsky. There are only 508 people in Israel with this name, and under 24,000 world-wide. His comments about ChatGPT came up in the news. But there was no article attached to the headline. It has resurfaced today as a NY Times Opinion piece, so there isn't access to it. The summary says that his opinion won't be pretty though. In brief he calls it high-tech plagiarism and a way of avoiding learning.
He's one of our great 20th century intellectuals. He retired from teaching at MIT to become a "full-time public intellectual".
"He is credited with revolutionizing the linguistics field by introducing the Chomsky hierarchy, generative grammar and the concept of a universal grammar, which underlies all human speech and is based in the innate structure of the mind/brain." That means we are genetically built for language and are born understanding how language works. He is a great political thinker and considers capitalism inherently exploitative and dangerous.
He has been influential in many fields, and there is a long list of quotes credited to him. Most are quite sobering:
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”
“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”
“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”
“It is quite possible–overwhelmingly probable, one might guess–that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”
There are a lot of comics with Noam Chomsky. The "most intellectual" joke I know category revealed this one:
Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, “Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it’s funny or not?” Gödel replies, “We can’t know that because we’re inside the joke.” Chomsky says, “Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.”
I found this comic strip at a site that references The Adventures of Noam Chomsky by Jeffrey Weston - a series of comics based on Chomsky's political views. The link isn't active to find more. |