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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Trump 47 and the Battle for the Soul of America
I was happy when Biden dropped out of the race. But why’d it take him so long? And I was pleased to see Harris rake in all the $$$ and do well in the polls,... Read more
Posted on 24 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Governors Island as a World Resource Center
I spent a good deal of time early in the millennium working with Zeal Greenberg, of the World Development Endowment Foundation, on a plan to develop Governors... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gary Marcus Vindicated on the Limits of Scaling?
He seems to think so, and I agree. Though I also believe that LLMs probably have won a permanent place in the repertoire of techniques for AI devices. We just... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Making a (large) Epoxy Table
While I've been watching Cam's videos for a few years. While I have no particular interest in these tables, I enjoy these videos. So I've watched a bunch of... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Time for Another Ramble: Melancholy, Claude, Bloom, Claude, Ring Composition, an...
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; May 29th was the last one. If you look over there to right at the Blog Archive you’ll see I’ve been on a... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Will Be Interesting to See How AI Affects Medical Practice
Not too many years ago Geoffrey Hinton confidently predicted that radiologists would soon be replaced by AI. That didn't happen. But now... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3QD Catch-Up: Affective Technology, Georgia on My Mind
Whenever I publish a new article at 3 Quarks Daily I also publish a somewhat shorter post here at New Savanna. That post links to the 3QD post and comments on... Read more
Posted on 21 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Coca-Cola and AI: It's the Real Thing! [Still] [Media Notes 144]
Alex Vadukul, Coca-Cola’s Holiday Ads Trade the ‘Real Thing’ for Generative A.I., NYTimes, Nov. 20, 2024. The opening two paragraphs: With temperatures dropping... Read more
Posted on 21 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why is Cobra Kai Better Than One Might Have Expected? [Media Notes 143a]
When Cobra Kai first showed up on Netflix back in 2020 I noticed it – Oh, the karate kid continues, that’s nice – but had no interest in watching it. Read more
Posted on 21 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scientific American Throws Shade on Elon
Well, not so much the magazine as their senior opinion editor, Daniel Vergano, who wrote an article entitled, Elon Musk Owes His Success to Coming in Second (an... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Far Can Next-token Prediction Take Us? Sutskever Vs. Claude
One of my main complaints about the current regime in machine learning is that researchers don’t seem to have given much thought to the nature of language and... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks About His Life, the Cosmos, and Stuff
From the YouTube page: For a lot of people black holes and string theory were topics that were filed in the mental box labelled ‘things I will never be able to... Read more
Posted on 19 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Heterarchical Generation of Movement in the Brain
"during the generation of behavior, the brain functions like a heterarchical system consisting of interconnected regions that flexibly influence each other... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bond, James Bond [Media Notes 142]
So far we’ve had 27 James Bond films, 25 by Eon Productions, and two others. I’ve seen many of them in theaters, perhaps even a majority, but certainly not all... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In Search of AI-shaped Holes (and Roles)
“There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”-> this is how I reconcile the facts that (a) AI is already powerful and (b) it’s having relatively little impact... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In the Beginning: OpenAI Email Archives (from Musk v. Altman)
Habryka over at LessWrong: As part of the court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, a substantial number of emails between Elon, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever,... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hossenfelder on Stagnation: “Science is in Trouble and It Worries Me”
Show notes: Innovation is slowing, research productivity is declining, scientific work is becoming more [less] disruptive. In this video I summarize what we kno... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rez Ball: Community, Alcoholism, and Basketball [Media Notes 141]
A week or three ago I watched Rez Ball streaming on Netflix. It’s about basketball on the Navajo reservation (the rez), where basketball is close to a civic... Read more
Posted on 15 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yudkowsky + Wolfram on AI Risk [Machine Learning Street Talk]
This is a long, rambling, conversation (4 hours), so I have a hard time recommending the whole thing. I’d say that Wolfram and Yudkowsky do manage to find one... Read more
Posted on 12 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tom Dietrich on the Current Evolution of AI
Posted in a Substack conversation here: An alternative view of what is happening is that we have been passing through three different phases of LLM-based... Read more
Posted on 11 November 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
