Well, "spooky action at a distance" is something that believing outright at the time, literally required faith - much like the faith required of scientist today, everything comes from nothing for no reason and without cause and as consequence - everything everywhere... Ohhh!!! and like 11 dimensions with maybe infinite universes, too -> oh yeah, and the universe is infinite, maybe.
They have so many ways of saying "God" without saying God.
It's ultimately an endeavor of finding testable descriptions of the world in the face of being fallible. It's not about the "why". It's about "how" the world is. No faith required. "Why" the world is is a philosophical question and perhaps a religious one. But that has nothing to do with testable theories.
Any scientific theory gains credibility by providing ways to test it. Each such experiment that fails to disprove the theory increases confidence in the theory's validity. There is no faith required for any of that and no god either. If you can predict that conditions A and B lead to C happening, and I can try it and see that indeed C is happening, then you have science going on, without any faith.
Depends what you mean with "AI". Actual intelligence? Yeah, maybe. LLM? No, they don't actually reason, an activity that Einstein did a lot of and without which coming up with his theory would have been impossible. He didn't just go on a random walk like what LLM temperature is doing.
Well, depends on the software project itself and where you are in its development lifecycle but:
- (1) A lot of developing can be just chores around managing scaffolds and repeatable work, and due to this macros, autogenerated code and other tools have been a thing at many layers for a long time; and
- (2) I remember copy-pasting from Google/StackOverflow (i.e. mostly search + pattern matching with some minimal reasoning) being criticized as a low-effort mode of development during the 2010s, before ChatGPT and AI assisted coding tools took over that part.
So yes, I'd argue a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever actually reasoning from first principles, AI tools just made that more visible.
Why is anybody still surprised that the AI bubble made it that big?