AI research is making grand progress at a rapid pace as everyone is aware. As for the human experts of the field, I can't say, I'm not up to speed. I'm not loop

AI research is making grand progress at a rapid pace as everyone is aware. As for the human experts of the field, I can't say, I'm not up to speed. I'm not looped in enough to tell if the developments border at theological inquiry at this point. The ethical concerns, such as military applications, and potential negative social effects, lends a manic, rabid tint to the trend, that existential risk can cause some people to pray. The field of research deals with its own existential questions as everyone knows. Douglas Hofstadter said he was depressed about it. It's fair to call the research a branch of math, but it's certainly applied, the developments are often explored via empiricism and not pure reason, in the sense that results are achieved partly through practice and then described with reason, rather than pure analytical reason causing results. I'm not intending to denigrate that, iterating on experience is the method of great painters and so on. Yeah, let's quote Leonardo Da Vinci: "Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments". It's undeniably giving life force to science and math, less in the Abel prize/Fields medal area and more in the Turing award area obviously. One or many Turing awards and the like are probably imminent to be given out. The optimism is more in the realm of business, isn't it. After all it is institutions of business, not academy, that are the driving force. AI is undeniably an optimistic space, I passed on buying NVIDIA in april 2023 and it has quadrupled since then as an example. So I suppose I'm not looped in with the hype, even though behaviourally I left work and returned to academia due to it arriving. The technology itself is unlikely to produce an extension of our limit to knowledge in the same way as the mathematicians of the former century, not because it's without utility but because it can't reason in such a structured way yet. Rather the technology itself will like a very broad irrigation system fill in the gaps and ease the flow downstream, rather than heightening the peak. We are starting to see this institutional efficiency become realised, but also the produced slop itself is starting to cause negative effects especially in the social sphere. Yes, the current period and the research branch has to be deemed optimistic in the sense that it extends the limits of what we know, not in the purely analytical way, but in a mix of reason and experience that is part of daily life itself. Wonder what the generation growing up with it will accomplish, and what difficulties they will face.