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
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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 )
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Superhuman AI, a 21st Century Philosopher's Stone?
I’ve been reading perhaps more than is healthy about such things as Superintelligence and AI takeoff (gradual or FOOM!) and am wondering whether or not the... Read more
Posted on 06 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways [common Sense, Explains Jokes]
Google develops Pathways Language Model, an AI system that can explain jokes and do commonsense reasoning, among other things. https://t.co/E8k3mRdcTK ;... Read more
Posted on 06 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Nature and Culture [Bergen Arches]
Posted on 05 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Machine in My Mind, My Mind on the Machine: Will We Ever Build a Machine to...
Some years ago, back in the Jurassic Era, I imagined that one day I would have access to a computer system I could use to “read” literary texts, such as a play... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neurosymbolic Hybrid Approach to Driver Collision Warning
Hybrid neurosymbolic system beats end-to-end deep learning in autonomous driving study from Caltech. https://t.co/5ODssnoupa— Gary Marcus 🇺🇦... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Remarks on the Visual System and Artificial Neural Nets
I wrote this blog post a year ago about how the visual system is not convolutional. I didn't think much of it until somebody told me last week they had found... Read more
Posted on 05 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New State Laws Are Making States More Different from Each Other
Shawn Hubler and Jill Cowan, Flurry of New Laws Move Blue and Red States Further Apart, NYTimes, April 3, 2022. As Republican activists aggressively pursue... Read more
Posted on 04 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cortical Connectivity
#brain stuff : An estimation of the absolute number of axons indicates that human cortical areas are sparsely connected https://t.co/Ci7ZBTYXcw pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 04 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Poetry and the Digital Simulacrum of Mind
Carmine Starnino, Poetry Digital personhood, The New Criterion, April 2022. Starnino starts out by talking about Racter, a well-known computer generator of... Read more
Posted on 04 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seinfeld Gets Psyched [like Horowitz]
From Daniel McGinn, Life’s Work: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld, Harvard Business Review (2017): How do you get psyched up before going onstage? You don’t hav... Read more
Posted on 02 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sparkychan Ponders the Future of AI While Sitting Beside a Railroad Track
Posted on 02 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Chess as THE Prototypical Problem for AI [w/ a Rodney Brooks Postscript on...
Back in August of 2020 I had some thoughts about chess as a prototypical domain for AI. My point was that chess is, in fact, a very specialized conceptual domai... Read more
Posted on 02 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
John Dollard on "free-floating" Aggression and Racism
[Note: I'm posting in this, in part, to keep John Dollard's name in my mind.]Why do people need racism? John Dollard addressed this question in his classic... Read more
Posted on 02 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jason Crawford: What Happened to Belief in Progress?
Jason Crawford, The Lure of Technocracy, The Roots of Progress, March 31, 2022. I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early... Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scott Alexander on the Argument from Low-hanging Fruit [stagnation, Redux]
Scott Alexander, The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions, Astral Codex Ten, April 1, 2022. It begins: Imagine scientists venturing off in some... Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Maplewood Prophesy [Friday Photos]
Click on photo to enlarge it. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Going on at My Academia Page at the End of March 2022
This graph depicts activity on my Academia.edu page from March 2, 2022 to April 1, 2022 (click on the graph to enlarge it): What happened at the end of March? Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Won't Be Long
Posted on 01 April 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Scaling in Deep Learning: Compute, Parameters, Dataset [makes My Head Spin]
The paper sought to answer this question: for a given FLOP budget, what is the optimal trade-off between parameters and dataset size? pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Has Yet to Take Over Radiology
Dan Eton, AI for medicine is overhyped right now: Should we update our timelines to AGI as a result? More is Different, March 29, 2022. AI for medicine has a lo... Read more
Posted on 30 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
