This morning I woke up to justinwolfers.bsky.social podcast on the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics. It reminded me of something from my work career when I was working with ML techniques and various statistical math techniques. 1/...
#AI #GenAI #math #physics
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpT6...
youtube.com
Bob Hall and Mike Woodford Win the 2026 Economics Nobel
YouTube video by Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers
![3.3 Ahistoricism and the AI hype cycles
When I started writing about science decades ago [...] I edited an article in which [a computer scientist] predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance
and other professions. That was in 1984.
John Horgan (2020, n.p.)
When we engage with the public, we notice people think that AI, as a field or a technology, appeared
on the scene in the last three years. And they experience confusion and even dissonance when they
discover the field and the technologies have existed for decades, if not centuries or even millennia
(Bloomfield 1987; Boden 2006; Bogost 2025; Guest 2025; Hamilton 1998; Mayor 2018). Such ahistoricism facilitates “the AI-hype cycles that have long been fuelled by extravagant claims that substitute
fiction for science.” (Heffernan 2025, n.p. Duarte et al. 2024). We have been here before, both with entanglements of AI and statistics with industry corrupting our academic processes, and with so-called
AI summers: hype cycles that pivot from funding booms to complete busts and cessation of research
(Bassett and Roberts 2023; Boden 2006; Law 2024; Lighthill et al. 1973; Merchant 2023; Olazaran
1996; Perez 2002; P. Smith and L. Smith 2024; Thornhill 2025).
To understand how industry tries to influence independent research for their benefit, we can look
to past examples of entanglement of industry and statistics. Ronald A. Fisher, a eugenicist and “the
founder of modern statistics” (Rao 1992), having been paid by the tobacco industry, claimed that because ‘correlation is not causation’ that therefore ‘smoking does not cause lung cancer’ (Fisher 1958;
Stolley 1991). The parallel between tobacco and technology does not end here: “both industries’ increased funding of academia was as a reaction to increasingly unfavourable public opinion and an increased threat of legislation.” (Mohamed Abdalla and Moustafa Abdalla 2021, p. 2; also see Knoester
et al. 2025) The histories of eugenics, statistics, comput…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreie4dme35ovxs6t4ekrdosziqnikttmmef63imkpxqh2fdlybzccoa)
