Soap originally relied on ashes as a source of alkali before purer chemicals like sodium hydroxide became widely available.
This is part of a response from Perplexity when I asked about the chemical relationship between ash and soap. The phrasing implies that no one relies on ashes anymore as a source of alkali for soap making, which I’m sure is false to some extent, although I’d believe it’s largely true.
However, the deeper implication behind the phrasing — the picture it helps paint in the unconscious mind of its reader — is that of an entire world that has permanently moved away from “traditional” methods and into an industrialized age, forever. History is in the past; it is not something we are still living through. Traditional methods are not something that will ever be relevant again except as an academic interest.
This is the ideology of progress. It isn’t the AI’s fault; rather, the fact that it outputs this phrasing is evidence of the ideology predominant in its training corpus as well as the source documents used to generate this particular response. It would pass beneath the notice of most readers because it’s how almost all of us are used to thinking about our world.
The idea that industrialization in its modern form is self-sabotaging — a strange episode in human history whose third act is yet to air, but likely to include some dramatic reversals as the planetary climate continues to destabilize and disrupt infrastructure — is much less comfortable. But what scares me more is that our very language has come to structure itself so as to be blind to those possibilities. I keep wondering things like if my ability to sanitize my hands in the future (and thereby avoid disease) will require someone in my community to hold and teach the methods of non-industrial soap making.