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 ( 7622 )
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We’ll Have a Reasonable Model of How LLMs Function Before We Reach AGI
I understand that the concept of AGI is vague, but a lot of smart people have a lot invested in it and in making predictions about when we’ll construct one.... Read more
Posted on 24 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Napping is Good
I've believed that since I was quite young. I nap all the time. Now the NYTimes has an article in which experts advise on the proper way to nap. Read more
Posted on 24 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A World Without (what Kind Of?) Work
Rachel Fraser, Can We Imagine a World Without Work? Boston Review, Nov. 21, 2023. Reproductive labor: Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, i... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Benchmarks for General AI Assistants
GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantspaper page: https://t.co/QjhBaRMvqNintroduce GAIA, a benchmark for General AI Assistants that, if solved, would... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Thanksgiving 2017 with the Barnett Family and Friends
Posted on 23 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Intelligence Requires Agency
Kevin J. Mitchell, Why free will is required for true artificial intelligence, excerpted from FREE AGENTS: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton... Read more
Posted on 23 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Do You Want an AI to Grade Your (children's) Homework?
An increasing number of papers are finding that AI is a reasonably good “grader” - often matching human evaluatorsWe don’t know all the biases these systems... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let's Look Through Some Windows
Posted on 22 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Some Quick Observations on the OpenAI Upheaval
Given the importance of the technology involved, it’s clear that the reverberations of this even will spread far and wide. One thing that is clear is that... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scientology, Rationalists, and AI Doom
Over at Crooked Timber Henry Farrell has an interesting article, What OpenAI shares with Scientology. I believe, however, is that he’s really comparing... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cat and Owl
Posted on 22 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Further Thoughts on the Chinese Room
In my tantalizing paper I all but declared Searle’s Chinese Room argument to be obsolete on the grounds that it no longer does any useful intellectual work.... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Effect of Context Length
Claude 2.1 (200K Tokens) - Pressure Testing Long Context RecallWe all love increasing context lengths - but what's performance like?Anthropic reached out with... Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Who's an Expert on Climate Change?
40% of U.S. adults think they know more about climate change than climate scientists. Source: https://t.co/C1W5CwgeJM pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 22 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Agni Pariksha Segment from Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues
Now that I've just put fire on the table, though a segment from Disney's original animated version of The Jungle Book, I might as well go whole hog. Read more
Posted on 21 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mimetic Desire in the Valley [I Wanna Be Like You]
David Streitfeld, The Long Shadow of Steve Jobs Looms Over the Turmoil at OpenAI, NYTimes, Nov. 21, 2023: This superhero narrative is the secret engine of just... Read more
Posted on 21 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
For the Moment, Where Things Stand in AI World, a Glance
The organizations who own the compute haven't changed. The amount of compute hasn't changed. The amount of compute devoted to training models is likely not to... Read more
Posted on 21 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Looking at Hoboken from Weehawken [& Weehawken from Hobken]
Posted on 20 November 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, More Talking with Dragons
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Girardian Interpretation of the Altman Affair, It's on My To-do List
Tyler Cowen posted the following tweet over at Marginal Revolution under the title "Solving for the Equilibrium": We remain committed to our partnership with... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
