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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Designer, anthropologist, and developer, Maggie Appleton has written a treatise on how chatbot sycophancy and passivity undermine the Enlightenment [maggieappleton.com] by undermining the original values of active intellectual engagement, skeptical inquiry, and challenging received wisdom.

As an expert on the Enlightenment, he’s clearly been roped into developing an opinion on whether we’re in an AI-fuelled “second Enlightenment.”

Remember the first Enlightenment [wikipedia.org]? That ~150 year period between 1650-1800 that we retroactively constructed and labelled as a unified historical event? The age of reason. Post-scientific revolution. The main characters are a bunch of moody philosophers like Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. The vibe is reading pamphlets by candlelight, penning treatises, sporting powdered wigs and silk waistcoats, circulating ideas in Parisian salons and London coffee houses, sipping laudanum, and retreating to the seaside when you contracted tuberculosis. Everyone is big on ditching tradition, questioning political and religious authority, embracing scepticism, and educating the masses.

Anyway, Professor Bell’s thesis is that our current AI chatbots contradict and undermine the original Enlightenment values. Values that are implicitly sacred in our modern culture; active intellectual engagement, sceptical inquiry, and challenging received wisdom.

Previously:
(2025) Book Documents the Rise and Fall of the Concept of the Private Life [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission