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Noam Chomsky, the revered and reviled genius once famously described as “the most important intellectual alive”, turned 95 on December 6, 2023. 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 Artificial Intelligence (AI) that it’s rarely acknowledged anymore. Amid the ongoing alarm that language-simulating machines could become a net negative for humanity, one wonders whether that keeps him up at night.

His stardom came in 1959 with his legendary review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour. Skinner, a psychologist and behaviorist, was enjoying the limelight in psychology circles with his theory of “operant conditioning” to encourage certain behaviours. For instance, a gold star awarded by a teacher for good behavior will encourage more of it from students. He tried to expand this idea into linguistics by breaking language down into components that are supposedly acquired via operant conditioning.

Chomsky completely disagreed with the idea and showed how useful it could be to examine the mind instead of just behavior in language-related areas like anthropology, psychology and neuroscience.

It’s not hard to see how Chomsky’s ideas of generative grammar and deep structure go hand in hand with today’s generative AI and deep learning. Without them, experts couldn’t have delved so deeply into neural networks. They wouldn’t have understood language well enough to even begin. His approach is a thread that has connected generations of AI researchers.

Still, about language-simulating machines becoming a threat, that does not keep him up at night. He seems to regard AI as a secondary worry compared with climate change.

(theconversation.com. Adaptado)