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 ( 7633 )
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GPT-3's Grip on Reality is Not at All Secure [HA!]
You may argue that GPT-3 is only playing the part of a T-rex here because of the interview context I set up. But what if GPT-3 IS a T-rex? Should we not all be... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Shrewd Take on the AI Scaling Debate
Some random musings on how the whole "AI scaling" debate. It is clear that neural nets can model any predictive distribution p(x_future|x_past) given enough... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Liberty State Park, Nersey City
Posted on 14 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Sentient AI? What’s Going On? Phenomena Are No Longer What They Seem. We Need Ne...
Here’s a more or less arbitrarily selected tweet about a Google engineer who believes that a chatbot, LaMDA, derived from a large language model (LLM) is... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Approaching the Watefront [11th St. Hoboken]
Posted on 13 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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First Thoughts on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age
This is science fiction? Yes, of course, I know it is. But where are the rockets? Where’s the space travel? I know that there’s more to science fiction than... Read more
Posted on 13 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lest We Forget, Flowers!
Posted on 12 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Born to Groove!
Updated 6.21.21. Updated 12.9.19. Updated 6.23.17. In the course of thinking about my recent rejection at New Literary History I found... In the early 1970s I... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Time-space Extent of Human Experience in the Cosmos
Can't stop thinking about this pic."Human experience of space and time in the physical world."[Eureka! by RJ Blin-Stoyle, 1997] pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 12 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
One Reason Why Current Large Language Models Are Architecturally Constrained,...
Just read Gary Marcus, Does AI Really Need a Paradigm Shift. The BIG-Bench paper, Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and Extrapolating the Capabilities of... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Kind of AI Would Understand This Proof? It Involves Reasoning About Visual...
If you are ready to take your understanding to the next level, watch this proof of the formula for the area of a circle, as presented by Dan Rubin. Read more
Posted on 11 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
City of the Future?
Posted on 11 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Happy Vibes for the Weekend
Friday vibes😍💃🏿...Happy weekend Good people ❤️...🎶 Tag @chrisbrown @Lojaymusic #sarz - Monalisa... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Metaphysical Potpourri
Posted on 10 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Marking Time: The SOTA in Academic Literary Criticism
John Guillory and Jessica Swoboda, Legitimation Crisis: A conversation with John Guillory, The Point, May 31, 2022. The opening: Jessica Swoboda: How do... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kim Stanley Robinson Talks About The Ministry for the Future
The Ministry for the Future: Climate Change and Speculative Fiction with Kim Stanley Robinson 1,603 views Apr 3, 2021 Meaningful global action on climate... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Upriver Downriver
Posted on 09 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Operationalizing Two Tasks in Gary Marcus’s AGI Challenge
I’ve been thinking about the Gary Marcus/Elon Musk AGI challenge. As you may know, Elon Musk casually tweeted that he expected to see AGI in 2029. Read more
Posted on 09 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flat Teams Are More Productive Than Hierarchical Ones
Flat teams increase productivity for those on bottom and increase long-term impact, suggesting the critical importance of inviting and involving more "brains" t... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From the Horse's Mouth on Why We Should All Be Losing Sleep Over the...
Super-AGI is all bent out of shape: Eliezer Yudkowsky has just run-up a post entitled, AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. It's tagged as a 44 minute read, which i... Read more
Posted on 08 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
