Last Words

What kind of meaning can machines make—and why does it matter that it’s not the same as ours?

Anthropologist Paul Kockelman's Last Words offers a rigorous but accessible account of how large language models actually work—and why the meaning they produce is fundamentally different from human meaning-making. Drawing on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, Kockelman’s witty and insightful pamphlet shows how LLMs are trained to predict word-word relations, not word-world relations, which explains both their uncanny fluency and their systematic blind spots. The result is a compact, essential guide to cutting through the hype: not a dismissal of AI, but a precise account of what it can and cannot do—and who profits from the confusion.