I kept assembling points I wanted to make in the comments, and then the article would cover them itself, so I'll just quote it:
> He imagined that this machine, which he called “the great instrument of reason,” would be able to answer all questions and resolve all intellectual debate. “When there are disputes among persons,” he wrote, “we can simply say, ‘Let us calculate,’ and without further ado, see who is right.”
> But as today’s data scientists devise ever-better algorithms for natural language processing, they’re having debates that echo the ideas of Leibniz and Swift: Even if you can create a formal system to generate human-seeming language, can you give it the ability to understand what it’s saying?
This is the important part. Having the naivete to assume that a flawed mechanical system represents the whole of Truth, is worse than having no system at all.
> He imagined that this machine, which he called “the great instrument of reason,” would be able to answer all questions and resolve all intellectual debate. “When there are disputes among persons,” he wrote, “we can simply say, ‘Let us calculate,’ and without further ado, see who is right.”
> But as today’s data scientists devise ever-better algorithms for natural language processing, they’re having debates that echo the ideas of Leibniz and Swift: Even if you can create a formal system to generate human-seeming language, can you give it the ability to understand what it’s saying?
This is the important part. Having the naivete to assume that a flawed mechanical system represents the whole of Truth, is worse than having no system at all.