Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
-
New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7356 )
-
Cherry Blossoms [Sakura | Japanese National Flower]
Posted on 13 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Another Ramble: AI Alchemy & the Future, RationalityLand, Life Only, Terminology...
I haven’t done one of this in a while. I do them when I’ve got a number of things jammed up in my mind and have trouble deciding what to do next. Read more
Posted on 12 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
If a Million Monkeys Are Typing out Code, How Long Before They Produce a Coheren...
Yesterday Eric Jang and Santiago Renteria had an interesting conversation in the Twitterverse about a recent blog post in which Scott Aaronson discussed... Read more
Posted on 12 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nine Distance Metrics
9 Distance Metrics used in Data Science and Machine Learning: https://t.co/iO5SjwLuip pic.twitter.com/R7T8awcIbM— Data Science Dojo (@DataScienceDojo) April 11, Read more
Posted on 11 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Intention, in the Philosophical Sense, and AI
Intention, in the philosophical sense, is a bit different from the common use of the term. It includes the common usage, but is more subtle. It is often... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Slap! I’ve Just Read Will Smith’s Autobiography
Will Smith with Mark Manson, Will, Penguin Press, 2021 If it hadn’t been for The Slap I wouldn’t have read it at all. Even then I didn’t seek it out. Rather, a... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Can We Expect from Large Language Models? [AI Alignment]
Second order effects of the rise of large language models:— Russell Kaplan (@russelljkaplan) April 10, 2022 1/ Soon, all products for creators will have embedde... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Subcortical Cognition
Subcortical contributions to cognitionhttps://t.co/2rxREPLen9Very happy to see our recent paper on subcortical syntax (https://t.co/csNHjUONrK) cited by... Read more
Posted on 11 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Machine in My Mind: Lessons Learned
Several days ago I recounted how my thinking on the distinction between minds and manchines had evolved: The machine in my mind, my mind on the machine: Will... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chess and “thinkism” as Constraining the AI Imagination
I’ve been recently arguing that AI has been dominated by chess from the beginning. I found this interesting passage in Luke Muehlhauser’s useful survey, What... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Semantic Map of the Human Brain
This fascinating video depicts work reported in the following paper: Huth, A., de Heer, W., Griffiths, T. et al. Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that... Read more
Posted on 10 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Sabine Hossenfelder Thinks About Nuclear Power
Sabine Hossenfelder, Is Nuclear Power Green?, Backreaction, April 9, 2022. Her conclusion: What speaks in favor of nuclear energy is that it’s climate... Read more
Posted on 09 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Microchips Are Made
Photographs and Video by Philip Cheung, text by Don Clark, The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip, NYTimes, April 8, 2022. High tech runs on microchips. Read more
Posted on 09 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Compositionality is Hard
The ways in which #dalle is so incredible (and it is) really put a fine point on the ways in which compositionality is so hard pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 09 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The First Time Will Smith Got in the Zone with Jazzy Jeff
A friend loaned me a copy of Will Smith’s autobiography, Will (2021). He talks about the first time he jammed with Jazzy Jeff, his DJ partner (82-83): There ar... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Multimodal Reasoning with Language in AI Systems
With multiple foundation models “talking to each other”, we can combine commonsense across domains, to do multimodal tasks like zero-shot video Q A or image... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy
New working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academia:... Read more
Posted on 08 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Does "understand" Mean? Can Google's Pathways Ascend the Stairway to AGI...
Google's Pathways language model has been making the rounds of the Twitterverse. Google develops Pathways Language Model, an AI system that can explain jokes an... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Star Trek: The Motion Picture [Media Notes 70] – I’ll Take Romance
I’ve been re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series – I’ve almost finished the first season – and thinking, how clunky! Shatner the ham, how plain everything... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nicolas Berggruen, Not a Philosopher King, but a Wealthy Man Who Respects and...
And it appears that he means philosophy in the broadest sense of the term and not necessarily an academic discipline. Michael Steinberger, How the ‘Homeless... Read more
Posted on 07 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
