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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Ethical Obligations Toward AIs(?)
Let us assume, as some do, though I do not, that human level artificial intelligence (AGIs) are inevitable. Some are worried that those AIs will go rogue. Do... Read more
Posted on 29 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Roberts on the Future as Imaginative Territory
In a piece that is otherwise about Dickens's ghost stories, Adam Roberts writes: The frame here is that the nineteenth-century saw a new kind of... Read more
Posted on 29 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ramble: Will Computers Ever Be Able to Think Like Humans? Do I Care?
Honestly, I don’t know. Something’s been going on in how I think about this kind of question, but I’m not quite sure what it is. It seems mostly intuitive and... Read more
Posted on 28 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seinfeld and AI @ 3QD
My latest post at 3 Quarks Daily: Analyze This! AI meets Jerry Seinfeld, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/03/analyze-this-ai-meets-jerry-seinfeld. Read more
Posted on 28 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Star Trek, the Original Series: Go Nuts, Young Man, Go Nuts! [Media Notes 69]
I decided to take a look at the original Star Trek series, the one that started in 1966, though I’m not sure that I saw it then. Read more
Posted on 26 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bessie Smith in “St. Louis Blues” from 1929
From Wikipedia: St. Louis Blues is a 1929 American two-reel short film starring Bessie Smith. The early sound film features Smith in an African-American... Read more
Posted on 26 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Burke: What Happened to Belief in Progress?
Timothy Burke, The News: The Broken Promises of Containment, Eight by Seven, March 23, 2022. From the essay: ...containment worked: the Soviet Union fell apart. Read more
Posted on 25 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Margaret Atwood on Utopias
Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception, and the Bible, The New York Times, March 25, 2022. From the interview: Atwood: Well, now. Now we’re getting... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Very Interesting Discussion of China in the World and in Relation to America b...
China and America (and Taiwan and Ukraine) | Robert Wright Kishore Mahbubani | The Wright Show 0:58 Kishore’s diplomatic career and recent book, Has China Won? Read more
Posted on 24 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ted Chiang on Ethical Blindness, Capitalism and the Rogue Impulses of Future AI
Ted Chiang, Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear, BuzzFeed, December 18, 2017: This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association... Read more
Posted on 23 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Geometry, Symbols, and the Human Mind
Siobhan Roberts, Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know? NYTimes, Mar. 22, 2022. Last spring, Dr. Dehaene and his Ph.D. student Mathias Sablé-Meyer... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Physical Scale, Tiny Robots, and Life
Sabine Hossenfelder has an interest post (and video) about small, smaller, and vanishingly small robots, These tiny robots could work inside your body: Here's... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Do the People Have Any Influence on National Politics in America?
Daniel Bessner, The End of Mass Politics, Foreign Exchanges, Jan. 5, 2022: If social media is any indication—and, despite what people might say or hope, it... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Programming for the Masses?
Craig S. Smith, ‘No-Code’ Brings the Power of A.I. to the Masses, NYTimes, March 15, 2022: Mr. Cusack is part of a growing army of “citizen developers,” who... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flush with Thought [What's Computation?]
Izhikevich's "Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience" book had a great section about how toilets are nonlinear oscillators, and the brain could be modeled as a... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
Tyler Cowen recently posted "Holden Karnofsky emails me on transformative AI" over at Marginal Revolution. I made two comments. Read more
Posted on 15 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Neural Programming Language for the Reservoir Computer
Okay okay, what do I mean by a programming language for RNNs? RNNs are usually trained on data using a cost function. In contrast, computers are programmed to... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Interesting Twitter Thread on the Russian Economy
After a bunch of tweets, including a series on Mexican avocado cartels, we get this: Why old oil and gas tycoons were expropriated, while metallurgy oligarchs... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Relationship Between Theory of Consciousness and Methodology
"We found that supporting a specific theory [of consciousness] can be predicted solely from methodological choices, irrespective of findings." https://t. Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is Cognitive Science?
While I’m thinking about definitions, I came up against the problem of defining “cognitive science” when I wrote my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literar... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
