Why AI Prompting Is the product of Ancient Rhetoric

This is the story with a reversal at the center, not smooth progress: formal logic (Aristotle → Boole → Turing) built the computer, then symbolic rule-based AI — logic's direct heir — FAILED. Statistical AI won by absorbing human language wholesale. So the prompt is now a rhetorical act, and the classical trivium returns as the discipline of the AI age. Two ironies prevail: Turing built the machine while proving logic's limits, and machines got fluent when we stopped formalizing language.