> What can we say about this with hindsight? > While the ideas of diagonalization and self-reference of course played a central role in the birth of modern mathematical logic and computer science, the most famous uses were negative.
The two sentences above are in the article, but I'm taking them out of context because they are my take on this entire AI brouhaha. There are a lot of "negatives" in our cultural reference frames. One of those, extremely pervasive, is that "humans were made by God". I could write that statement as "humans are exceptional in a way that can't be replicated", which might be ideologically softer, but then I would be taking a long roundabout to make my point. Which is that, after praying and worshiping for thousands of years, and (yes! yes!) sculpting our language and our sagas to account for and praise the divine and its intent, then there's little mystery in our many, many attempts to reify in mathematics and logic our purely cultural framing. It doesn't matter how much of an atheist a thinker is, they still have tons of transitive faith.