Noam Chomsky Archive

Noam Chomsky | artificial intelligence

"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. Let's stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It's the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers. "

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | Therefore it’s important to distract them

"The bewildered herd is a problem. We’ve got to prevent their roar and trampling. We’ve got to distract them. They should be watching the Superbowl or sitcoms or violent movies. Every once in a while you call on them to chant meaningless slogans like "Support our troops." You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going to destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think. Therefore it’s important to distract them and marginalize them."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | why the propaganda system works

"I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | bludgeon is to a totalitarian state

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | The general population doesn’t know

"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | Voting is not an option

"It’s about what you would expect from a bipartisan democracy campaign — it’s an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | course of intellectual self defense

"Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | governments will use whatever technology

"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy – which is their own population"

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity

"Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on."

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky | The smart way to keep people passive and obedient

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow a very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people a sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate."

Noam Chomsky