Noam Chomsky on Artificial Intelligence

Noam Chomsky was one of the pioneers of computational linguistics in the 1950s. According to the IEEE Computer Society History Committee, he was the “father of formal languages”. While not a programmer or computer scientist himself, he contributed to the advancement of computer science, positing that the language faculty consists of a computational device that generates syntactic structures.

Chomsky’s early research at MIT was funded by the US military as it revolved around providing commands to computers using natural language. Being anti-militarist, especially anti-Vietnam war, he thought of resigning from MIT but, having been promoted, he stayed on while making it clear that he was against US foreign policy in many parts of the world. Chris Knight, a professor at University College London, summarizes this: “Had he resigned in disgust in the mid-1960s, when he was thinking of doing so, he might never have gained the platform he needed to signal his dissidence across the world. There are times when all of us have to make compromises, some more costly than others.” Knight authored the book, published in 2018, entitled Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics.

More recently, Chomsky has commented on the language models used in artificial intelligence, referring to their applications as “sophisticated, high-tech plagiarism” and “a threatening, dangerous development” (See this 2023 interview: “Noam Chomsky on Artificial Intelligence” ). The better it gets, the worse it gets, Chomsky comments in this other interview, referring to how plagiarism affects educational policies (“Noam Chomsky on Artificial Intelligence, Language and Cognition”). For example, some teachers have gone back to requiring handwritten essays; others have had to re-devise essay projects to ensure individual student effort. The plagiarism involved is, in his opinion, an impediment. Instead of students thinking for themselves on a topic, AI can do the thinking for them, which in Chomsky’s view defeats the purpose of a proper education. In fact, he refers to ChatGPT as "a toy used to mislead people", and "a game you can play with".

Finally, in an interview published in Common Dreams in May 2023, Chomsky fears that AI cannot be controlled: “I can easily sympathize with efforts to try to control the threats posed by advanced technology, including this case. I am, however, skeptical about the possibility of doing so. I suspect that the genie is out of the bottle. Malicious actors–institutional or individual–can probably find ways to evade safeguards. Such suspicions are of course no reason not to try, and to exercise vigilance.”

Celebrating Noam Chomsky: A Prodigy in Linguistics and Anti-Imperialism

News of Noam Chomsky’s recent ill health has caused quite a stir lately. Writing a short blog post about the father of modern linguistics will not do justice to this retired Professor, rightly referred to by Jacobin magazine as an “intellectual and moral giant”. While other academics distanced themselves from politics, he insisted on the role of intellectuals in the public sphere, as in, for instance, his 1967 essay on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” - a reflective essay initially given as a Harvard speech - that was so impactful it maintained attention for decades. In fact, he was interviewed about it as recently as 2021. He is noted as one of the most cited writers in history. In 1992, MIT News reported that "Professor Chomsky is in illustrious company. The top ten cited sources during the period were: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel and Cicero."

Chomsky was interested in Semitic linguistics at a very young age. He studied both Hebrew and Arabic early on and taught Hebrew to fund his university studies. Being multi-lingual, he was especially interested in general linguistics. His contributions include the idea of “Universal Grammar”, positing that though languages may appear different on the surface, deep down, their structures are similar, as well as the idea that the capacity for language is mostly innate rather than learnt, challenging the behaviourist theories prevalent at the time. My linguistics professors in Cambridge admired him and even wrote books about him though they did not all agree with his theories on psycholinguistics or the biology of language. John Lyons published his book Chomsky in 1970, and Peter Matthews authored numerous publications referring to Chomsky, including Grammatical Theory in the United States: From Bloomfield to Chomsky published in 1993 and Generative Grammar and Linguistic Competence, published in 1979, to name only a few.

After Chomsky’s work in linguistics impacted the philosophy of language and contributed to cognitive science, his writings on politics also generated a huge following. Though he no longer writes or speaks, he is profoundly disturbed by the injustice he perceives around him. Following last year’s stroke, which numbed the right side of his body and affected his speech, Chomsky has been watching the news of Gaza and raising his left arm in “lament and anger”, as reported by his wife recently. The false rumours about his death this week were distressing, especially since he himself had warned about misinformation, being a longstanding critic of news media. The irony!

To be continued.

What is Scholasticide?

The term scholasticide has recently gained currency in the media though it is not new. Apparently, it was coined in 2009 by Oxford Professor Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian affairs scholar, in reaction to events in Gaza back then. The term has been used widely once again since January of this year on online platforms such as The Conversation (“The War in Gaza is Wiping out Palestine’s Education and Knowledge Systems”), The Star (“How Israel’s Scholasticide Denies Palestinians their Past, Present, and Future”), and McGill Daily (“Scholasticide in Gaza”). More than one Turkish news source has used it (“‘Scholasticide’: How Israel is Systematically Destroying Palestinian Education in Gaza”), and a university student from Toronto, Magdalee Brunache, writing about the current situation in Haiti, borrowed the term in “A “Scholasticide” has been Happening in Haiti”.

There have been international calls against the phenomenon as in Scholars for Palestine UK and Scholars Against the War in Palestine: “International Call to Action Against Scholasticide”. The UN has expressed concern over it as seen on the website of the Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner: “UN Experts Deeply Concerned over ‘Scholasticide’ in Gaza”. Most recently, Al Jazeera published an open letter about it by Palestinian academics and administrators: “Open Letter by Gaza Academics and University Administrators to the World”.

Wikipedia has no entry for scholasticide though it mentions it under the entry “Attacks on Schools during the Israeli Invasion of Gaza” . Contrarily, one would expect to see such a term on the list of Words of the Year for 2024, if not as a winner, at least as a runner up. Interestingly though, as the BBC’s Bitesize section rightly comments, dictionaries don’t write themselves. Lexicographers identify the new words for the dictionaries after reflecting on popular terms and using software for statistics and analysis. They then select the words of the year based on their perceptions. For example, Oxford identifies a word of the year if it is “…judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance.” Strangely, the term has not entered any known dictionary yet - not Webster, Oxford, or Cambridge - not even Urban Dictionary. Will lexicographers ever recognize scholasticide? Only time will tell.