On the second point, it’s worth noting how many of the most vocal and well-positioned critics of LLMs (Marcus/Pinker in particular) represent the still academically dominant but now known to be losing side of the debate over connectionism. The anthology from the 90s Talking Nets is phenomenal to see how institutionally marginalized figures like Hinton were until very recently.
Off-topic, but I couldn’t find your contact info and just saw your now closed polyglot submission from last year. Look into technical sales/solution architecture roles at high growth US startups expanding into the EU. Often these companies hire one or two non-technical native speakers per EU country/region, but only have a handful of SAs from a hub office so language skills are of much more use. Given your interest in the topic, check out OpenAI and Anthropic in particular.
1. AI is a genuine threat to lots of white-collar jobs, and people instinctively deny this reality. See that very few articles here are "I found a nice use case for AI", most of them are "I found a use case where AI doesn't work (yet)". Does it sound like tech enthusiasts? Or rather people terrified of tech?
2. Current AI is advanced enough to have us ask deeper questions about consciousness and intelligence. Some answers might be very uncomfortable and threaten the social contract, hence the denial.