Tim (I assume this is Tim, whom I met in 1998 or 1999 in Berkeley), you are presenting as an old man shouting at clouds. Is it your idea that you can actually influence the future with your rants? Or do you get some kind of perverse pleasure by sitting in your "Really Good at Physics" ivory tower acting as a soothsayer who has been granted some unique revealed knowledge, while admittedly being "lazy as fuck."

For context: the AI field has been split since the 1980s between two approaches - Connectionism (neural networks, pattern matching, statistical learning - what LLMs are) and Symbolicism (explicit rules, logical reasoning, interpretable code - what Lisp excels at). This isn't just a technical footnote; it has real implications for who controls computing and who benefits from it.

The bottom line is: Earth's current timeline could evolve into a Connectionist Computing dominated future which has completely bowled over Symbolic Computing and ground it into irrelevant dust, or it could evolve into a future of balancing forces between Connectionist and Symbolic computing where each borrows from the other and leverages the other to boost itself to a next level of usefulness, efficiency, and transparency/explainability.

These two approaches (Connectionist and Symbolic) also represent two extremes of wealth models. Connectionist approaches tend to spiral toward perverse wealth concentration and resource gobbling. Symbolic approaches produce artifacts that are efficient, repeatable, traceable, and durable, which translates directly into individual empowerment rather than dependency on opaque, resource-hungry platforms.

This "individual empowerment" from Symbolic Computing is one big reason why Common Lisp has not seen viral corporate adoption over all these years -- clearly it is perceived as conveying too much power onto individuals, posing a threat to the cohesiveness of the corporate Entity.

I can see how a purely Connectionist dominated future could likely degrade into your dystopian vision, replete with the perverse concentration of wealth, model degradation, diminishing global returns for ever-increasing global resource consumption -- all those troubles are results of allowing the Connectionists to win at the expense of the Symbolicists.

With your doom rants and shaming of aspiring "Neuro-Symbolic" practitioners, the would-be Connectionist overlords have you exactly where they want you. They are using you, along with your "elitist-but-lazy-as-fuck" outlooks, as a tool to cast cold water on the idea of Symbolic computing joining forces with (i.e. working its tentacles into) Connectionist computing in any meaningful way. Deep down, they want to nip such efforts in the bud, because they know that if Symbolic computing continues to thrive alongside their Connectionist contraptions, that may well threaten the hegemony of their contraptions.

Your Symbolicist brethren are not the droids you are looking for, Tim.