This really betrays Hofstadter's age and the fact that he's being left behind by technology and by the modern world.
It's really sad to see something like this happen to him.
Instead of seeing it as everyone having an amazing language coach in their pocket. Or finding ways to radically accelerate language learning. Or of bringing everyone together but still having those few core languages you know (you will always be ignorant of most languages). Or of saving languages that might otherwise die. He focuses on a hypothetical negative.
This take is both glib and ageist. Hofstadter isn't writing this because he's old. It's because he backed the wrong horse.
Hofstadter was a brilliant and up-and-coming AI researcher in his 20s, wrote an amazing book, started the Fluid Analogies Research Group, and was going to create the next generation of AI based on the power of analogies.
Then for decades -- nothing. His work on analogy was completely overtaken by deep learning. Recently there was an article on his partial recanting of the whole idea of analogy as the core of cognition, something which has been foundational to his research.
Wordplay and translation always figured prominently in both his popular writing and his research as examples for the power of analogy. He has a whole book on translation, for example.
So it's hardly surprising that when the very "stupid" approach of backprop on a neural net can work with analogy better than any system he's ever created that he might focus on the negatives. His entire research project has been usurped.
The insult-people-for-being-car-skeptics trope is starting to show its age [1].
It's true that old fogey skeptics who have vested interest in the old ways are disposed towards motivated reasoning, but they're also the ones most able call out the motivated reasoning by the few who make disproportionate profit most from pushing new technologies.
> they're also the ones most able call out the motivated reasoning
I strenuously disagree. The people with most to lose have the least objectivity and the greatest tunnel vision. There’s no silver lining to such bias. Being able to shoe a horse doesn’t give you special insight into civil engineering and sociological trade-offs.
It's really sad to see something like this happen to him.
Instead of seeing it as everyone having an amazing language coach in their pocket. Or finding ways to radically accelerate language learning. Or of bringing everyone together but still having those few core languages you know (you will always be ignorant of most languages). Or of saving languages that might otherwise die. He focuses on a hypothetical negative.
Age is the ultimate disease.