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 ( 7828 )
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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 -
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
