Noam Chomsky, the revered and reviled genius once famously described as “the most important intellectual alive”, turns 95 today. He is a monumental figure in modern linguistics, and only a slightly lesser deity in psychology, philosophy and political activism.
His work establishing cognitive science as a discipline is so fundamental to the rise of AI that it’s rarely acknowledged anymore.
Amid the ongoing alarm that language-simulating machines could become a net negative for humanity, have we wandered too far from Chomsky’s vision of a science of the human mind?
