by Bill Benzon I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am about to tell a story about how…

by William Benzon ChatGPT is based on the same underlying computational architecture as GPT-3, which was released in the summer of 2020. That’s when I started reading “GPT for Dummies” articles. Some were more useful than others, but none of them gave me what I wanted. So I started poking around in the technical literature.…

by Bill Benzon “I’m trying to treat her as an equal.” – Moe, talking about Sutan Of philosophy and food Moe, the name has two syllables, is Moto’s wife and Sutan’s mother. Though it may also be a play on “a Japanese word that refers to feelings of strong affection mainly towards characters in anime,…

by William Benzon He liked being known as “SBF.” Why? It is kind of cool on its own terms. But I wonder it there might not be some mimetic desire lurking there. After all, there IS an enormously wealthy and well-known man who is known by his three initials, two of which are shared by SBF.…

by William Benzon, with the assistance of ChatGPT It’s that time again. You may have heard about it, you may even have played with it. Another AI engine has dropped! – one of those black boxes that Tim Sommers talked about last week. This one is called ChatGPT and, as its name indicates, it’s a…

by William Benzon Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey early in the Fall. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the final performance of the competition.…

by William Benzon I grew up in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. At some point “mutually assured destruction” entered my lexicon. I came to accept the threat of nuclear war with the USSR as something I’d live with until I died (perhaps in a nuclear war?). The Berlin Wall fell in…

by Bill Benzon As I am writing this (September 11, 2022) the Metaculus prediction site sets arrival of AGI – aka artificial general intelligence – as early as July 25, 2029, though a more rigorous setting of the question indicates that our incipient machine overlords won’t appear until May 26, 2042.[1] As people are interested…

by Bill Benzon We in the West live in societies organized around the idea and practice of work, where work is conceived as activity undertaken for economic gain. While that activity may benefit the worker immediately and directly, as in the production of food or clothing for their own use or to be used by…

by Bill Benzon 11th Street Lilies: That’s a kind of photograph that exemplifies an urban pastoral sensibility. Loosely speaking it depicts an urban setting, but one that evokes a pastoral mood. In this case the photograph is dominated by the lilies in the foreground, which are in a flowerbed in a median strip running for…

by Bill Benzon The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps…

by William Benzon Notice that I said, “discovered,” not “created.” The Metaverse has always been there, you just have to know how to look for it. Mark Zuckerberg is just one in a long line of supplicants in search of the Metaverse. Whether or not he’ll find it, who knows? Neil Stephenson named it in…

by Bill Benzon What is the blues? It is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility. Feeling blue. Feeling blue? It is a musical form, existing in its own tradition, but also as a form within the jazz tradition. The latter is what this series article is about, the blues as it functions within the evolving…

by William Benzon Jerry Seinfeld is fond of comparing jokes to machines: Jokes are tiny intricately crafted machines, where all the parts fit neatly and precisely together, moving in precise, if sometimes surprising, fashion. Last summer I decided to pit Seinfeld against the precisest (is that even a word?), most super-modern, and biggest intricate machine…

by William Benzon I forget just how I came to watch Steven Spielberg’s Jaws several years ago. Most likely I saw it on my Netflix homepage and, noting that I’d not seen it when it came out in 1975, I said to myself, “Why not?” I knew it had made Spielberg’s career and was generally…

by Bill Benzon I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz as a child growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music, often on big old 78s. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven. Walt Disney is part…

by Bill Benzon ASC, “altered states of consciousness” – I don’t know when the term was first coined, but I became aware of it late in the 1960s. I took it as referring primarily to states of mind induced by psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, mescaline, and LSD, and to states induced by meditative practice.…

by Bill Benzon About a week and a half ago I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and saw one of those tweets that was commenting on something about which I was clueless. Meta? What’s that about? Such tweets are common enough. I generally never find out what they’re about. But this little mystery resolved…

by Bill Benzon We all know that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. We also know that’s nonsense, pious and sentimental nonsense. Which is why it has been said so often. The subtext, of course, is that the cradle-rocking hand is connected, through appropriate anatomical intermediaries, to a foot that’s chained to…