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Articles by Bill Benzon
Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright's "The God Test"
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026) is Robert Wright's sixth book. It builds on themes and concerns in the previous five books, which I'll get to at the end. As the title indicates The God Test is about artificial intelligence. Until OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022 AI existed mostly in science fiction, a collection of genres that has become increasingly popular in the last five decades.
The Mystic Jewels, the Vatican, and Matrix Miriam
A bit over a year and a half ago I published " Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising," a science fiction yarn set a decade later and half way around the world from Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. Robinson gave us a post-climate change world with pretty much the same institutional structure of the current world. Things were a bit looser in some ways, the very rich were, if anything, even richer, and finance made that world go round.
Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics
Tycho Brahe was a significant figure in my family. Why? Because my father's parents were from Denmark, and Tycho Brahe was Danish. Danes were thus important in the Benzon household, as was Danish pastry ( wienerbrød, Vienna bread), the real stuff with cardamom seeds, not the fluff you get in diners. And then there is rabarbergrød, a cloudy translucent rhubarb pudding laced with slithers of almonds.
What's A Tablescape? I'm Glad You Asked.
The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn't know that when I coined the term earlier this year. I've been taking photos of my meals for several years now. Every now and then I'd sit the camera on the table and take a shot. The shot below appears to be my oldest tablescape. It's from Hoboken's Malibu Diner back in July of 2029. It's a straightforward shot of a cup of coffee, though obviously the coffee is not visible from this angle.
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?
If I had been born as an Australian Aborigine, or an American Indian, I'd probably have been a shaman. If I'd been born in ancient India, Greece, Israel, or medieval Europe, I might well have been a priest. If I'd been born in colonial America, I might have been a clergyman; Harvard, Yale and Princeton were started to train clergymen. As it is I was born in 1947 in a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel country.
The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure
OpenAI released GPT-3 in June of 2020, though not to the general public. Those who had access to it were variously impressed or stunned: Is this it? Is AI really coming at long last?
Chess and Language as Paradigmatic Cases for Artificial Intelligence
The digital computer emerged out of devices that were built during World War II for cracking codes and calculating artillery tables. Almost as soon as the computer came into existence people were thinking about using it for chess and language. Alan Turing developed Turochamp, an algorithm for playing chess in 1948.
Of Grammar and Truth: Language Models and Norms, Truth and the World
This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there's a much shorter section in which I explain how the three of us created that article. I conclude by I taking the question of how to properly credit such writing.
American Heartbreak: The 'Urban Design Studio' in Jersey City
Jersey City is a medium-size city on the West bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan. Up through the middle of the 20 th century it was a port and a railroad hub but that disappeared when containerized freighter became too deep to travel that far up New York Bay. Without any freighters the railroads were no longer needed. Light industry disappeared as well. Jersey City became back-offices and bedrooms to Manhattan-based business.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Into the Bopi with Steven Spielberg
I didn't see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when it came out in 1982, but I was certainly aware of it. It was an unexpected smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, at least for a while. At this point I don't remember why I didn't go to see it. After all, I'd enjoyed Spielberg's previous film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Whatever. I certainly knew the basic story: A weird little alien gets left behind and is befriended by a young boy. They do stuff together.
Some Hybrid Remarks on Man-Machine Collaboration
When ChatGPT was released late in November of 2022 my immediate response was, "meh." But then I decided that I needed to check it out, if only out of curiosity. Within an hour or so my reaction went from "meh" to "hot damn!" I put it through its paces in various small ways before deciding to give it a whirl on a task I understood well, interpreting a text. In this case I chose a film, Steven Spielberg's Jaws.
ChatGPT Makes Images. It's FUN! (and illuminating)
Sometime in 1984, after Apple had released the first Macintosh, my friend Rich sent me a short note he'd written on one. The note had some text, not much, nor do I remember about what, and a black and white image of Japanese woman that Apple had put on the over of the user guide for the Mac.
Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution
Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin.
Trapped in Work Mode: The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It's Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional
I have been thinking about artificial intelligence and its implications for most of my adult life. In the mid-1970s I conducted research in computational semantics which I used in analyzing Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 129, "Th' Expense of Spirit." In the summer of 1981 I participated in a NASA study investigating ways to incorporate AI in NASA operations and missions. There I learned about an earlier NASA study that had looked into creating self-replicating factories on the moon.
White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond
The Saint Matthew Passion - yes, I know, by Bach - was a rock band I played in back in the ancient days, 1969 through 1971, when I was working on a master's degree in Humanities at Johns Hopkins. Before I can tell you about that band, however, I want to tell you something about my prior musical experience, both when I was just a kid growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the Western part of the state. Football country, Steeler country.
Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo
"Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don't remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, "you don't recognize what you have until you lose it." The current federal administration has stolen my country from me.
Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising
Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. - John Maynard Keynes Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
One thought for living in a high-tech world: The groove before the machine
That's a highly condensed form of an idea that began with this thought: You have no business making decisions about the deployment of technology if you can't keep people on the dance floor for three sets on a weekday night. There are a lot of assumptions packed into that statement. The crucial point, however, is the juxtaposition of keeping people dancing (the groove) with making decisions about technology (the machine). What did I have in mind?
John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons
It began at The New Republic. I don't know just why I did it, but I bought a subscription to that magazine the year I went off to college. I remember when Robert Wright was there and I remember when he published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), which was about cultural evolution, a subject I'd been thinking and publishing about for decades. So I was paying attention when he formed Bloggingheads.tv in the mid-2000s.
John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons - 3 Quarks Daily
LeBron James Still Bitter Over $163 Million Box Office Mistake as Lakers Star Confirms Surprising Movie Choice The Lakers have had a wild season so far. From being heavily criticized for their summer acquisitions to being written off as non-contenders for the …
Three Dialogs with a Friendly Alien: Claude 3.5 Sonata
On the one hand, nothing has changed since August 2020, when I wrote GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. I argued that, yes, GPT-3 marks a major technological breakthrough, one that may transform the way we live. But this technology is not sufficient. It is not deep enough. If we're not careful, we're going to crash and burn, like machine translation did in the mid-1960s, and like classical AI did in the mid-1980s (the so-called AI Winter).
More Growth, Melancholy, and MindCraft @3QD [revised and updated] — LessWrong
This is cross-posted from New Savanna. I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily: Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World. I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, I think it’s one of my best non-technical pieces in a decade, maybe more. I enjoyed doing it. I learned a lot. But it was tricky. The ending was not as good as it needs to be. “Why not?” you may ask. I ran out of time. I had to upload it to meet the deadline. “Why did that happen?” you ask.
Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World
If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh's work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone...
Depression and Creativity — LessWrong
This is cross-posted from New Savanna. I’m working on an article about depression and decided to ask about the connection between depression and creativity. Claude makes a few general remarks and asks for my thoughts. So I mention some remarks that my teacher, David Hays, had made years ago, mentioning that he was a computational linguist. After some general remarks, Claude asks: ... did Hays develop this idea through his work in computational linguistics?
Shakespeare, the Starry Welkin, and Donald Trump
by William Benzon A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran an op-ed in which Drew Lictenberg, who is the artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company, pointed out that there has been a drop in Shakespeare productions recently: American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare's plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19.
Georgia on My Mind
"Georgia on My Mind" was composed and recorded by Hoagy Carmichael (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) in 1930.
Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self
In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" as one example and a passage from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge's poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend's take a walk through the countryside.
Affective Technology, Part 2: Emotion recollected in tranquility
In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature: We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water.
Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art ( tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism.
Relationships among words, metalingual definition, and interpretability — LessWrong
This is cross-posted from New Savanna, First, I talk about now natural language is its own metalanguage and that allows them to define new works in terms of existing ones. Then I discuss the concept of justice in terms of mechanism of metalingual definition proposed by David Hays some years ago. I conclude with some remarks on interpretability in view of Anthropic’s recent research on features.
Pop-Tarts Re-frosted: An allegory about creativity in a corporatized world?
From beginning to end, is constructed with the intricacy of Seinfeld's stand-up bits. Taken as a sequence of five-minute segments it's wonderful, and there are resonances among and mid- and long-range connections among those segments. But you can't carry an hour and 20-minute film on watch-making intricacy alone. There's got to be a compelling story, a plot. Oh, we've got lots of plotting: Kellogg's vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs.
If language is for communication, what does that imply about LLMs? — LessWrong
Noam Chomsky famously believes that language originated to facilitate thought, but then came to be a medium of communication. Others believe the reverse, that it originated as a facility for communication which turned out to facilitate thinking. That is certainly my view. If that is so, then one would think that language is structured to facilitate communication. Communication is serial, one token at a time, token after token.
An interesting mathematical model of how LLMs work — LessWrong
My colleague, Ramesh Viswanathan, sent this to me. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve seen on how transformers work. Alas, the math is beyond me, which is often then case, but there are diagrams early in the paper, and I understand them well enough (I think). It seems consistent with intuitions I developed while working on this paper from a year ago: ChatGPT tells stories, and a note about reverse engineering: A Working Paper.
At last! ChatGPT does, shall we say, interesting imitations of “Kubla Khan” — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. As you may know, I have a long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and have written a lot of posts about it. If you scan through those posts you’ll find that some of the more recent one’s involve ChatGPT. Here’s my first attempt to have ChatGPT parody the poem: How ChatGPT parodied “Kubla Khan” and pwned DJT45 at the same time While the Chatster’s performance is not without interest, the parodies were not very good.
The Irises Are Blooming Early This Year
I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. I have been photographing the irises in the Eleventh Street flower beds since 2011. So far I have uploaded 558 of those photos to Flickr. I took most of those photos in May or June. But there is one from April 30, 2021, and three from April 29, 2022. I took the following photograph on Monday, April 15, 2024 at 4:54 PM (digital cameras can record the date and time an image was taken). Why so early in April?
Thirteen Ways To Think About An A.I.
I give up. ONE: An Alien A.I. is a visitor from another planet, perhaps even from another galaxy, maybe from the beginning of the universe, or the end. Is it friend, or foe? Does it want to see our leader? Perhaps it is interested in our water supply. Maybe it's concerned about our propensity for war and our development of atomic weaponry. Or perhaps it is just lost, and is looking for a bit of conversation before setting out to find its way back home. TWO: A Walk in the Park Or a lark ascending.
GPT, the magical collaboration zone, Lex Fridman and Sam Altman — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. I was making one more run around the web before I buckled down and got back to a major writing task, when I came across the brand-spanking-new conversation between Lex Fridman and Sam Altman. Lex is Lex, and an interesting guy, and Sam is, well, he's interesting to me, but – there was a hint of megalomania at the end of that NYTimes story from Mar. 31, 2023, that rubbed me the wrong way, and all the AI hype – he IS the CEO of OpenAI.
Making Connections with ChatGPT: The Macksey Game — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. In my most recent piece for 3 Quarks Daily, Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI], I introduce what I’ve called The Macksey Game, named after my undergraduate teacher and mentor, Dick Macksey. Macksey was something of a polymath. It seemed like he’s read everydamnthing. No one has, of course, note even the Chatster – not everything that’s been written down is on the internet.
Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI]
I read a great deal of Bertrand Russell when I was in my teens. I read various collections of essays, such as Why I Am Not A Christian, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, and Marriage and Morals, some of which my father had stored in a box in the basement, along with Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, a book or two by this guy named Freud, though I forget which one, and some others. I also Russell's - dare I say it?
The role of philosophical thinking in understanding large language models: Calibrating and closing the gap between first-person experience and underlying mechanisms — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. Let’s start with some conception of what philosophy is. On that I like an essay by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science with a particular interest in biology, “On the Relation Between Philosophy and Science” (which I found via Dan Dennett). Godfrey-Smith offers three roles: 1) intellectual integration, 2) conceptual incubation, and 3) critical-thinking skills. He regards the first as fundamental and as the most important of the three. I agree.
ChatGPT refuses to accept a challenge where it would get shot between the eyes [game theory] — LessWrong
Yesterday it was Jaws and game theory, today it’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (henceforth SGGK). But really, the sequence runs in the opposite direction. As you may know, SGGK is a medieval romance that starts and ends in King Arthur’s court. The story is framed by a game, the beheading game. There is a significant literature on games in SGGK and at least one article that analyzes the beheading game, Barry O’Neill, “The Strategy of Challenges: Two Beheading Games in Medieval Literature” (1990).
The Jolly Green Giant Chronicles [ChatGPT] — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. At the end of December, on the 30th, I gave ChatGPT the following prompt: What happened when the Jolly Green Giant had a colorless green idea after eating a stew laced with ergot?
On the 12/8 Path with Charlie Keil
I knew about Charlie Keil somewhat before I met him and long before we began collaborating on various projects. In 1966 he published Urban Blues, which was a study of such singers as Bobby Blue Bland and B.B. King, blues musicians who wore sharp suits and performed in urban venues with electrified instruments. The book received wide acclaim, both in intellectual circles and in, of all places, the rock and roll press. And why not? After all, much of rock and roll was based on the blues.
Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All
I've now seen twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven't watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn't find it...Didn't find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those is true, then why did I watch it twice? Maybe I found it disturbing and wanted to figure out what was bugging me? If it was disturbing, the disturbance was unconscious.
Aye Aye, Cap'n! Investing in AI is like buying shares in a whaling voyage captained by a man who knows all about ships and little about whales
That title reads like I have doubts about the current state of affairs in the world of artificial intelligence. And I do - who doesn't? - but explicating that analogy is tricky, so I fear I'll have to leave our hapless captain hanging while I set some conceptual equipment in place. First, I am going to take quick look at how I responded to GPT-3 back in 2020.
On the Road with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band
The road was generally somewhere in the Capital District of upstate New York. Think of it as a group of small cities and towns and centered on Albany, the state capital, Troy, where I lived at the time, and Schenectady, incidentally, where my grandfather had his first job in the United States, and where the band rehearsed in the basement of a photography studio in a somewhat sketchy part of town.
Are (at least some) Large Language Models Holographic Memory Stores? — LessWrong
Cross-posted from New Savanna. That’s been on my mind for the last week or two, ever since my recent work on ChatGPT’s memory for texts [1]. On the other than, there’s a sense in which it’s been on my mind for my entire career, or, more accurately, it’s been growing in my mind ever since I read Karl Pribram on neural holography back in 1969 in Scientific American [2]. For the moment let’s think of it as a metaphor, just a metaphor, nothing we have to commit to. Just yet.
Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]
I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor. Since Yevick's work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited.
The Mistake of the Trinity Brain Theory: Debunking the Evolutionary View of the Human Brain
Title: The Misconception of the “Old Brain” and “New Brain” Theory Debunked by Psychology Expert URL: [Insert URL here] By [Your Name] In a recent study conducted by Joseph Cesario, a renowned psychologist from Michigan State University’s Department of Psychology, it has been established that the widely accepted notion of a “new brain evolved by augmenting old brain structures” is fundamentally flawed. Cesario challenges this theory, explaining the reasons behind its inaccuracy.
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