I grew up in TN, but I've never been to Oak Ridge, and never knew much about it. Was just glancing at the Wikipedia page, out of curiosity and came across this odd tidbit in the History section:
A popular legend holds that John Hendrix (1865-1915), a largely unknown local man, predicted the creation of the city of Oak Ridge around 40 years before construction on the project began. Hendrix lacked any formal education and was a simple logger for much of his life. Following the death of his youngest daughter, Ethel, to diphtheria, and the subsequent departure of his wife and three remaining children, Hendrix began hearing voices in his head. These voices urged him to stay in the woods and pray for guidance for 40 days and 40 nights, which Hendrix proceeded to do. As the story is told, following these 40 days spent in rugged isolation, Hendrix began seeing visions of the future, and he sought to spread his prophetic message to any who would listen.[19] According to published accounts,[20] one vision that he described repeatedly was a description of the city and production facilities built 28 years after his death, during World War II.
The version recalled by neighbors and relatives reported:
In the woods, as I lay on the ground and looked up into the sky, there came to me a voice as loud and as sharp as thunder. The voice told me to sleep with my head on the ground for 40 nights and I would be shown visions of what the future holds for this land.... And I tell you, Bear Creek Valley someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be. And there will be a city on Black Oak Ridge and the center of authority will be on a spot middle-way between Sevier Tadlock's farm and Joe Pyatt's Place. A railroad spur will branch off the main L&N line, run down toward Robertsville and then branch off and turn toward Scarborough. Big engines will dig big ditches, and thousands of people will be running to and fro. They will be building things, and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake. I've seen it. It's coming.
Hendrix, in light of his tales of prophetic visions, was considered insane by most and at one point was institutionalized. His grave lies in an area of Oak Ridge now known as the Hendrix Creek Subdivision. There are ongoing concerns over the preservation of his gravestone, as the man who owns the lot adjacent to the grave wishes to build a home there, while members of the Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association are fighting to have a monument placed on the site of his grave.
I mean I agree that it's probably vastly overvalued as a whole, the leap between current LLM capabilities and an actual trusted engineer is pretty big and it seems like a lot of people are valuing them at the level of engineer capabilities.
But the caveats are that simulated neural networks are a technological avenue that theoretically could get there eventually (probably, there's still a lot of unknowns about cognition, but large AI models are starting to approach the scale of neurons in the human brain and as far as we can tell there's no quantum magic involved in cognition, just synapses firing which neural networks can simulate).
And the other caveat is like the bear trash can analogy.. the whold park ranger story where they said that it's impossible to make a bear-proof trash can because there's significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
Now I don't think AI is even that close to bear level in terms of general intelligence, but a lot of current jobs don't require that much intelligence to do them, we just have people doing them because theres some inherent problem or step in the process that's semantic or fuzzy pattern matching based and computers / traditional software just previously couldn't do it, so we have humans doing stuff like processing applications where they're just mindlessly reading, looking for a few keywords and stamping. There are a lot of industries where AI could literally be the key algorithm needed to fully automated the industry, or radically minimize the number of human workers needed.
Crypto was like 'hey that decentralized database implementation is pretty cool', in what situations would that be useful? And the answer was basically just 'laundering money'.
Neural network algorithms on the other hand present possible optimizations for a truly massive number of tasks in society that were otherwise unautomatable.