I think the camera analogy is much more apt than the engine analogy, so this article was intriguing, but unfortunately the author falls into the rhetoric they d

I think the camera analogy is much more apt than the engine analogy, so this article was intriguing, but unfortunately the author falls into the rhetoric they decry when they complain about equating black holes with God, which is to just pull out a flourish like "monkeys at typewriters all the way down" to casually step over the difference between intelligence and mere computation, or to equivocate what is observed in neural networks with "intelligence" at all, and then by way of disclaimer to then dismiss intelligence completely. It would be much more interesting to discuss how machine learning gives us a lens into latent structures in data, and where that could be applied in the future, or even what that learning says about what we don't know about intelligence. And I was hoping that's where this would go, but the article seems to be attempting some grand theory of everything that's unlikely to have a practical application, which makes it difficult to discuss without first blocking out the millenarian aspects.