Science and the Phantasies of Our Time | Observing Science

Every age has its particular folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.” From Charles Mackay: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. London: Richard Bentley. 2 vols 1841.

In the year since ChatGPT stunned the world with a compelling, easily available, and user-friendly large language model, there has been an extraordinary boom in interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Fortunes have been made by companies that trade in goods that are related to AI, and the number of column inches dedicated to AI in public media have soared.

Read more here.