So it turns out that the flavor of AI that is finally reaching the mainstream is the large language model. And we’re uncomfortable with it not only for the obvious reasons that there’s a machine acting eerily like a human, but also because we can’t explain precisely how it’s doing what it’s doing. And in that sense it’s like our own brains, and by extension so much about our universe. We’ve developed staggeringly complex science and simultaneously can’t explain how we think or where the universe came from or even make general relativity and quantum mechanics play nice together. This general situation has been unsettling for a long time, so we invented gods to explain the universe. But the gods didn’t make AI.

An image created for me by DALL-E