Bill Benzon

Jan 1, 2025 | 3quarksdaily.com | Bill Benzon

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).

Dec 5, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Bill Benzon

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.

Dec 3, 2024 | 3quarksdaily.com | Bill Benzon

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...

Nov 28, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Bill Benzon

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?

Nov 7, 2024 | 3quarksdaily.com | Bill Benzon |William Benzon

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.