Claude 3.7 describes psychedelic Marilyn

In all the other posts in my “Claude Describes” series I’ve had Claude describe a photograph or photographs that I’ve taken. This time it’s something different. Yes, it is a photo, but not of some scene. It’s a photo of a piece of art. Since I explain the art in the conversation I won’t do so here.

But I will point out that I was a bit surprised when Claude didn’t spontaneously identify Marilyn Monroe immediately. After all, she is a well-known public figure. I was even more surprised that it failed to do so when I explicitly asked it to identify the person in the image. So I told Claude that it was Marilyn Monroe. It came back with some basic information. I then asked it what artist was known for colorful portraits of her. At that point Claude searched the web (it can do that now) and came back with some links (I haven’t included them in the dialog.) But why did it have to search the web, or was it just showing me that it could do so? After all, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn’s are among his best-known images.

When I search on “Marilyn Monroe” I get scads of links, including scads of images. Claude indicated that it was “face blind.” Really? Is that inherent in the underlying LLM, or was Claude trained to be face blind when it was readied for the web?

As always, my remarks are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain face.

* * * * *

Describe this image in any terms you find useful and convenient.

This image shows an artistic portrait drawing of a woman with blonde curly hair styled in a classic vintage look. She's wearing a red dress with a plunging neckline and has red lipstick. She's smiling warmly at the viewer.

The background features vibrant, psychedelic wavy lines in multiple colors - orange, purple, blue, green, and red - creating a colorful, dynamic pattern that surrounds the central figure. On the right side of the composition, there are white calla lily flowers drawn in a more minimalist style.

The artwork appears to be done in a mixed media style, possibly colored markers or pens for the colorful wavy background and graphite or ink for the portrait and flowers. There's a small signature visible in the bottom left corner with what looks like a date of "05" (possibly 2005).

The overall style combines realistic portraiture with a psychedelic, 1960s-inspired background pattern, creating an interesting contrast between the subject and the vibrant surroundings.

Interesting, and perceptive. Do you recognize the young woman? She’s very famous, or was at one time, perhaps not quite so much these days.

Since I'm face blind, I can't recognize the specific woman in the portrait. Could you tell me who she is? Based on the artistic style and the blonde curly hair with vintage styling, it appears to be a stylized portrait of someone significant from entertainment history. The red dress and overall glamorous presentation suggest she might be a famous actress or performer from the mid-20th century, but I'd need you to tell me specifically who she is rather than making an identification based on facial features.

Marilyn Monroe.

Thank you for letting me know. Marilyn Monroe was indeed an iconic figure in entertainment history, known for her roles in films like "Some Like It Hot," "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," and "The Seven Year Itch." She became a major sex symbol and pop culture icon in the 1950s and early 1960s.

This artwork presents an interesting artistic interpretation of her, combining her recognizable blonde curls and glamorous red dress with the psychedelic background that feels reminiscent of later artistic movements. The contrasting styles create an interesting juxtaposition between the classic Hollywood glamour she represented and more contemporary artistic expression.

Would you like to discuss any particular aspects of this artwork or Marilyn Monroe's cultural impact?

What artist was famous for his colorful prints of Marilyn Monroe?

I'll help you with that information. Let me search for the artist known for colorful prints of Marilyn Monroe.

[Claude searches the web and comes back with some links]

Based on my search, Andy Warhol was the famous artist known for his colorful prints of Marilyn Monroe. In the early 1960s, shortly after her death in 1962, Warhol immortalized Monroe's face in a series of celebrity portraits, beginning with a Diptych of 25 copies of her face. Over the years, he produced many more brightly colored prints of Monroe using his iconic silk screen printing method.

In 1967, Warhol began publishing limited-edition print portfolios under Factory Editions, with the Marilyn portfolio being the first such collection. It consisted of ten images created from the same 1953 publicity photograph of Monroe from the film "Niagara," which he transformed with intentionally off-register printing and vibrant, psychedelic color combinations.

The Marilyn Monroe series featured ten screen prints, each sized 36 x 36 inches, with vibrant colors reflecting her vivacious personality. In many of the prints, her iconic lips are boldly colored a deep red, and her platinum blonde hair is emphasized with variants of yellow.

These colorful Marilyn Monroe prints have become some of the most iconic and recognizable works of pop art, and they continue to influence contemporary artists today.

That's correct. But this wasn't by Warhol. As you correctly surmised, it’s mixed media. The basic imagine is a line drawing. I was given that line drawing and a choice of colored markers or colored pencils, or both, I suppose. I chose the markers. I signed and dated it in the lower left, though signature is partially clipped: “WLB 3.21.25.” WLB = William Lawrence Benzon.

Pansies

Using Machine Learning to Measure CEO Depression

Cheng, S.-Y. and Golshan, N.M. (2025), Silent Suffering: Using Machine Learning to Measure CEO Depression. Journal of Accounting Research, 63: 689-767. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-679X.12590

Abstract: We introduce a novel measure of CEO depression by applying machine learning models that analyze vocal acoustic features from CEOs' conference call recordings. Our research was preregistered via the Journal of Accounting Research's registration-based editorial process. In this study, we validate this measure and examine associated factors. We find that greater firm risk is positively associated with CEO depression, whereas higher job demands are negatively associated with CEO depression. Female and older CEOs show a lower likelihood of depression. Using this novel measure, we then explore the relationship between CEO depression and career outcomes. Although we do not find any evidence that CEO depression is associated with CEO turnover, we find some evidence that turnover-performance sensitivity is higher among depressed CEOs. We also find limited evidence of higher compensation and higher pay-performance sensitivity for depressed CEOs. This study provides new insights into the relationship between CEO mental health and career outcomes.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

I have an article in 3 Quarks Daily that has a different approach to depression:  Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World.

Why this obsession with IQ? [It's as American as apple pie.]

Amanda Hess, What Is Elon Musk’s IQ? NYTimes, Apr. 5, 2025.

FWIW estimates put Musk's IQ between 100-110 on the low end and 155. But we don't really know because we don't have the results of an IQ test for him. On the American obsession:

IQ is the term of choice for the man who doesn’t just think he’s smart, but thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Americans have long been obsessed with IQ, and the human rankings it facilitates, but rarely is that fixation stated so plainly, so incessantly, and at such high levels. To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim.

Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into “low IQ individuals” (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and “high IQ individuals” (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son).

But a wider public fascination with IQ is in the water. (Sometimes literally: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opposed the fluoridation of tap water, claiming that it causes a decrease in IQ.) Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” applicants. Vice President JD Vance has insulted the British former diplomat Rory Stewart on X, writing that “he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” In February, a senior Trump administration official asked employees of the CHIPS Program Office to supply their SAT or IQ scores.

An interest in juicing IQ through training and supplements bridges the manosphere and the parenting internet. Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “misogynist” and online masculinity idol who faces human-trafficking charges in Britain and Romania, claims an IQ over 140 and preaches on a podcast about how to “rewire your brain for relentless success.” Nucleus, a genetic testing start-up backed by the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, made a stir last year with a test that supposedly calculates an “intelligence score based on your DNA.” As the writer Max Read pointed out recently, some X users have begun asking, apparently earnestly, how “low IQ” people experience the world, as if they are fundamentally less human.

Such fixations are a long American tradition, and they are cresting again now at a key moment in history — at the consummation between Silicon Valley capitalism and right-wing political power.

And Silicon Valley, of course, is obsessed with the intelligence of AI systems, giving them batteries of standard tests and, I assume here an there, IQ tests as well. The objective is to create systems that are smarter than humans in every way - and then hope that they don't decided to dominate and even eliminate us. (Hess gets to this at the end of her article.)

Hess then goes into a history of intelligence testing, including this little nugget:

In his 2023 history “Palo Alto,” Malcolm Harris writes of Stanford as an institution built on eugenic thinking. Before Leland Stanford founded Stanford University, he established what he called the “Palo Alto System” to classify, train and breed superior racehorses at an intense pace of production — a system that sometimes resulted in the snapped tendons of weaker colts but had the benefit of weeding out inferior horses before investing too much in their development. Once Stanford applied this punishing system to human achievement, it seeded a century-long obsession with intelligence scoring in Silicon Valley — and in the America that it increasingly shaped.

Then there's this:

It was America that pioneered the use of IQ for punitive ends, using low scores to deny certain immigrants entry to the country, to forcibly sterilize disabled people, and to push low-ranking soldiers into the line of fire while elevating high scorers to officer positions.

Though the crimes of Nazi Germany compromised the global popularity of eugenics, and encouraged the disavowal of the word, the British and American victories in the World War II also worked as an endorsement of the use of IQ testing in organizing war and, more generally, identifying elites.

In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young used the term “meritocracy” to describe an emerging society organized around “merit” as the new justification for hierarchical power, which he defined as a combination of IQ scores and effort.

The last section of the article is entitled, "When Intelligence Is a Commodity," and reviews various commercial ventures aimed at boosting intelligence ending, of course, with AI.

There's more at the link. FWIW I have a number of posts focused on IQ.

What's happening to fireflies around the world?

Here's a video:

Here's a post by biologist Jerry Coyne.

Humans learn new chess concepts from AlphaZero

L. Schut, N. Tomašev, T. McGrath, D. Hassabis, U. Paquet, & B. Kim, Bridging the human–AI knowledge gap through concept discovery and transfer in AlphaZero, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (13) e2406675122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2406675122 (2025).

Significance

As AI systems become more capable, they may internally represent concepts outside the sphere of human knowledge. This work gives an end-to-end example of unearthing machine-unique knowledge in the domain of chess. We obtain machine-unique knowledge from an AI system (AlphaZero) by a method that finds novel yet teachable concepts and show that it can be transferred to human experts (grandmasters). In particular, the new knowledge is learned from internal mathematical representations without a priori knowing what it is or where to start. The produced knowledge from AlphaZero (new chess concepts) is then taught to four grandmasters in a setting where we can quantify their learning, showing that machine-guided discovery and teaching is possible at the highest human level.

Abstract

AI systems have attained superhuman performance across various domains. If the hidden knowledge encoded in these highly capable systems can be leveraged, human knowledge and performance can be advanced. Yet, this internal knowledge is difficult to extract. Due to the vast space of possible internal representations, searching for meaningful new conceptual knowledge can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Here, we introduce a method that extracts new chess concepts from AlphaZero, an AI system that mastered chess via self-play without human supervision. Our method excavates vectors that represent concepts from AlphaZero’s internal representations using convex optimization, and filters the concepts based on teachability (whether the concept is transferable to another AI agent) and novelty (whether the concept contains information not present in human chess games). These steps ensure that the discovered concepts are useful and meaningful. For the resulting set of concepts, prototypes (chess puzzle–solution pairs) are presented to experts for final validation. In a preliminary human study, four top chess grandmasters (all former or current world chess champions) were evaluated on their ability to solve concept prototype positions. All grandmasters showed improvement after the learning phase, suggesting that the concepts are at the frontier of human understanding. Despite the small scale, our result is a proof of concept demonstrating the possibility of leveraging knowledge from a highly capable AI system to advance the frontier of human knowledge; a development that could bear profound implications and shape how we interact with AI systems across many applications.

Friday Fotos: An act of quiet despiration, leavened with bacon

If no longer America, then what nation or nations will answer the calls of freedom and dignity? [Claudia Sheinbaum]

I was raised believing that America was the greatest country in the world, the home of the free and the brave, leader of the free world. I continued to believe that, or something like it, well into this century. To be sure, I found the war in Vietnam disillusioning, heartbreaking, as well as the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I found the rise of inequality dismaying, though the Occupy movement gave me some hope, alas, short-lived. Obama was disappointing. Trump's first term wasn't as bad as it could have been. Biden? Another disappointment.

And now, Trump's let loose the dogs of war in his own country, even on the people who elected him. To be sure, that's not what he thinks he's doing. And his many followers don't seem to realize what he's doing to them. Well, some of them know well enough, and they're fine with that, the ones with means. But the rank and file MAGA, they're still under the spell, most of them. It does not look good.

But if not America, what's the alternative?

Michelle Goldberg has a suggestion: Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump? NYTimes, April 4, 2025. She was elected president of Mexico in October 2024.

Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,” can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo. Goldberg's column is a long one, too long for me to summarize. Here's how she characterizes Sheinbaum:

“I feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology professor and leading Mexican feminist who has known Sheinbaum for years, told me in Mexico City last week. “She is a light in this terrible situation that we are facing: Putin, Trump.”

Lamas said she’d feared a sexist backlash against Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, but six months into her term, there’s no sign of one. Sheinbaum was elected with almost 60 percent of the vote. Today her approval rating is above 80 percent. Last week, Bukele [president of El Salvador], who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” asked Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the name of the planet’s most popular leader, evidently expecting it would be him. Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”

For those of us steeped in American identity politics, it can be hard to understand how a woman like Sheinbaum came to lead the world’s 11th-most-populous country. Her parents, both from Jewish families that fled Europe, were scientists who’d been active in the leftist student movement of the 1960s. As a child, Sheinbaum was a dedicated to dancing ballet, a discipline that still shows up in her graceful posture and in the many social media videos of her doing folk dances with her constituents. She did research for her Ph.D. in energy engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

She is, in short, part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically demonized by populist movements. But as I was told again and again in Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in light of her close relationship with López Obrador, who she’d worked beside since he was mayor of Mexico City 25 years ago, and whose economic populism earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden citizens.

At the end:

An easy riposte is that democracy means more than just elections. But that argument is convincing only if you’ve already accepted that liberal democracy is a superior system, and it’s increasingly clear that many people do not. In elections across the globe, we’re seeing how little many voters care about abstract liberal proceduralism; they’re happy to cede power to the executive branch if they think it will improve their lives.

I find this trend tragic, but there are no signs that it’s going to reverse any time soon. Given this reality, we should judge politicians not just on how they amass power, but also on what they do with it.

In the United States, centralized authority has allowed Musk, inspired by Argentina’s Milei, to take a metaphorical chain saw to all sorts of federal programs, including those that help the most vulnerable. Sheinbaum, by contrast, is trying to build a national care system for children, the disabled and the elderly, lifting the burden of unpaid labor from many Mexican women. American progressives should be cautious about projecting their desperation for a heroine onto Sheinbaum. But at least right now, her kind of populism looks far better than the alternatives.

There's much more in the article.

Regardless of what happens with Trump's current term, or for that matter, with Sheinbaum's (six years), the America I had believed in, the one that would save the world, that America is gone forever. We may well be able to recover from the depredations of the Trump presidency, but that America, leader of the free world etc., that America is gone forever.

* * * * *

Over at The Bulwark William Kristol writes:

Yesterday afternoon, having dispatched his regular mid-day newsletter, my friend and colleague Jonathan Last was moved—compelled, I think—to write a second, emergency newsletter. His eloquent and powerful missive arrived in our inboxes around 6:30 p.m. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now.

The heart of Jonathan’s argument is that yesterday, April 3, 2025, was the day that, in his words, “The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.”

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

It was almost 111 years earlier, on August 3, 1914, that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stood with a friend at dusk at a window of his room in the Foreign Office, looking out across St. James’s Park. Seeing the first lights being turned on along the Mall, Grey famously remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The Liberal statesman was right. World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust—these all followed in the space of three decades. The lamps were not to be lit again in Grey’s lifetime. A century of relative stability and peace, of progress and prosperity, was followed by thirty years of chaos and war, of darkness and misery.

Later on he writes: “But now a new time of monsters—of terrible mistakes, monstrous deeds, and disastrous consequences—could well be upon us.”

A short note on the importance of fun [Homo ludens]

Tyler Cowen has just interviewed economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie on a variety of topics:

...the economic impacts of historical pandemics, the “happy story” of the Black Death and why it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, the history of variolation and how entrepreneurs created vaccination franchises in 18th-century England, why local communities typically managed epidemics better than central authorities, the dastardly nature of medieval guilds, the European marriage pattern and its disputed contribution to economic growth, when sustained economic growth truly began in England, why the Dutch Republic stagnated despite its early success, whether she agrees with Greg Clark’s social mobility hypothesis, her experience and conducting “anthropological fieldwork” on English social customs, the communitarian norms she encountered while living in Germany...

It's all interesting. But, given my current interests, this passage caught my eye:

COWEN: Let’s say an 18-year-old, highly intelligent young woman comes to you. She’s moving to England; she might want to be a professor. What advice do you give to her? From America, let’s say.

OGILVIE: [...] I would say, and this is actually not just England-specific, but changing cultures. When I was 20, I went to live in Germany. I lived there, actually, for quite a long time while I was doing research for my doctorate.

When you initially go to a foreign place, whether it’s Germany — or later, I lived in the Czech Republic for a year — you won’t figure out right away what people in this culture do to feel comfortable and have fun. But you have to have the faith that they do have things that they do, and you need to learn what those things are that they do in this culture to be comfortable with one another and to have a great time.

The sooner you learn that, the happier you’ll be fitting into a new culture. I think that would be my general life advice to anyone who is moving to a new country. Find out what people do for fun, and then start doing it.

I suspect that there is more to that advice than the fact that fun is, well, fun. There's something deeper going on. It is not just that fun is a better way to pass the time than boredom or even work, but that it puts you more fundamentally touch with the people.

Summertime, Sarah "the voice" Vaughan

Lawrence Summers on why universities must resist Trump

Lawrence H. Summers, If Powerful Places Like Harvard Don’t Stand Up to Trump, Who Can? NYTimes, April 3, 2025.

The U.S. government is trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission. [...] The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means.

Summers asserts that elite universities do have problems with antisemitism, identity and diversity issues, and "have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order." Reform is needed. However:

...the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities. [...] Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act appropriately allows that federal funding of universities can be made contingent on their avoiding discrimination. But as a recent statement by a group of leading law professors points out, it also protects against this power’s being used to punish critics or curtail academic freedom. Among the law’s requirements are notice periods, hearings, remedies that are narrowly tailored to specific infractions and a 30-day congressional notification before any funding is curtailed.

None of this appears to be part of the Trump administration’s approach to universities.

The White House has not confined its efforts to claims about discrimination. The administration seeks to dictate what universities do on matters ranging from student discipline to academic organization to campus policing.

His penultimate paragraph:

Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?

Flash!

Perspective on musical neurodynamics

Harding, E.E., Kim, J.C., Demos, A.P. et al. Musical neurodynamics. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00915-4

Abstract: A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. Although neural synchronization is a well-studied mechanism underpinning expectation, it has even more far-reaching implications for music. In this Perspective, we survey the literature on the neuroscience of music, including pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect. We describe how fundamental dynamical principles based on known neural mechanisms can explain basic aspects of music perception and performance, as summarized in neural resonance theory. Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement and strong anticipation, we propose that people anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain–body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action and coordination that we collectively experience as music. Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems. This analysis of empirical findings from the perspective of neurodynamic principles sheds new light on the neuroscience of music and what makes music powerful.

Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment

Michael V. Heinz, Daniel M. Macklin, Brianna M. Trudeau, et al., Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment, The New England Journal of Medicine, VOL. 2 NO. 4, March 27, 2025, DOI: 10.1056/AIoa2400802

Abstract

Background

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) chatbots hold promise for building highly personalized, effective mental health treatments at scale, while also addressing user engagement and retention issues common among digital therapeutics. We present a randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing an expert–fine-tuned Gen-AI–powered chatbot, Therabot, for mental health treatment.

Methods

We conducted a national, randomized controlled trial of adults (N=210) with clinically significant symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), or at clinically high risk for feeding and eating disorders (CHR-FED). Participants were randomly assigned to a 4-week Therabot intervention (N=106) or waitlist control (WLC; N=104). WLC participants received no app access during the study period but gained access after its conclusion (8 weeks). Participants were stratified into one of three groups based on mental health screening results: those with clinically significant symptoms of MDD, GAD, or CHR-FED. Primary outcomes were symptom changes from baseline to postintervention (4 weeks) and to follow-up (8 weeks). Secondary outcomes included user engagement, acceptability, and therapeutic alliance (i.e., the collaborative patient and therapist relationship). Cumulative-link mixed models examined differential changes. Cohen’s d effect sizes were unbounded and calculated based on the log-odds ratio, representing differential change between groups.

Results

Therabot users showed significantly greater reductions in symptoms of MDD (mean changes: −6.13 [standard deviation {SD}=6.12] vs. −2.63 [6.03] at 4 weeks; −7.93 [5.97] vs. −4.22 [5.94] at 8 weeks; d=0.845–0.903), GAD (mean changes: −2.32 [3.55] vs. −0.13 [4.00] at 4 weeks; −3.18 [3.59] vs. −1.11 [4.00] at 8 weeks; d=0.794–0.840), and CHR-FED (mean changes: −9.83 [14.37] vs. −1.66 [14.29] at 4 weeks; −10.23 [14.70] vs. −3.70 [14.65] at 8 weeks; d=0.627–0.819) relative to controls at postintervention and follow-up. Therabot was well utilized (average use >6 hours), and participants rated the therapeutic alliance as comparable to that of human therapists.

Conclusions

This is the first RCT demonstrating the effectiveness of a fully Gen-AI therapy chatbot for treating clinical-level mental health symptoms. The results were promising for MDD, GAD, and CHR-FED symptoms. Therabot was well utilized and received high user ratings. Fine-tuned Gen-AI chatbots offer a feasible approach to delivering personalized mental health interventions at scale, although further research with larger clinical samples is needed to confirm their effectiveness and generalizability. (Funded by Dartmouth College; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT06013137.)

This song has been been haunting me for two or three days: Chan Chan

This is the original version:

From the webpage:

The original Buena Vista Social Club album was recorded for World Circuit Records over six days at the vintage EGREM studios in Havana. Released in 1997, the album went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, selling over 8 million copies and contributing to the rise in popularity of Cuban, as well as Latin American, music.

This is a version by Playing for Change:

From the webpage:

This song reached the masses from the Buena Vista Social Club project and I have heard so many variations and versions performed around the world ever since. We decided to create our own version while on a trip recording and filming music in Cuba in 2015. The Legendary Pancho Amat on the Cuban tres along with the incredible piano playing of Roberto Carcasses set the framework for this song, and then once we heard Teté Garcia Caturla sing lead vocals we realized exactly why we do what we do. Listen to how well Cuba, the USA, and the Middle East all get along when the music plays. - Mark Johnson, PFC producer and co-founder

AI & humans, then and now

In “The Evolution of Cognition” (1990) David Hays and I argued that the long-term evolution of human culture flows from the architectural foundations of thought and communication: first speech, then writing, followed by systematized calculation, and most recently, computation. In discussing the importance of the computer, we remark:

One of the problems we have with the computer is deciding what kind of thing it is, and therefore what sorts of tasks are suitable to it. The computer is ontologically ambiguous. Can it think, or only calculate? Is it a brain or only a machine?

The steam locomotive, the so-called iron horse, posed a similar problem for people at Rank 3. It is obviously a mechanism and it is inherently inanimate. Yet it is capable of autonomous motion, something heretofore only within the capacity of animals and humans. So, is it animate or not? Perhaps the key to acceptance of the iron horse was the adoption of a system of thought that permits separation of autonomous motion from autonomous decision. The iron horse is fearsome only if it may, at any time, choose to leave the tracks and come after you like a charging rhinoceros. Once the system of thought had shaken down in such a way that autonomous motion did not imply the capacity for decision, people made peace with the locomotive.

The computer is similarly ambiguous. It is clearly an inanimate machine. Yet we interact with it through language; a medium heretofore restricted to communication with other people. To be sure, computer languages are very restricted, but they are languages. They have words, punctuation marks, and syntactic rules. To learn to program computers we must extend our mechanisms for natural language.

Back then the question was mostly an academic one. That is to say, it had little purchase on the daily lives of most people. Consequently, however intently a relatively small cadre of academics debated the question, it was of relatively little interest to ordinary people.

That changed quite dramatically when, late in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT on the web where anyone with an internet account and a web browser to access it and play with it. Overnight millions did so. The question of whether or not this thing was dead or alive, that is inanimate or animate, mindless or conscious, impressed itself on millions of users. It was no longer an academic question. It was a live question, and to some it was even existential: How long before this, this, this THING, goes rogue and destroys us?

Fortunately, that has not happened. We are all alive to debate the issue. And we do so, using terms that existed long prior to the release of ChatGPT. That’s a problem.

Back in the days when the questions of computer intelligence, of computational minds, and of artificial consciousness were academic, we had no examples of devices whose behavior was phenomenologically problematic. Computers played an inferior game of chess, though that ended in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, and were at best halting, clumsy, and relentlessly stupid with language. You could take whatever position you wished about the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI), artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term coined early in the millennium, or even superintelligence, a term popularized by Nick Bostrom’s 2013 book of that title, when it came to actual devices, it was clear that they were not intelligent or conscious.

ChatGPT could “talk,” just like a human being, or so much so that one had to work hard to find a meaningful difference. Many users proceeded as though there were no meaningful difference. Now the question of AI, AGI, or even superintelligence has taken on a different valence. Any chatbot “knows” a wider range of subjects than even the most brilliant and learned of humans. In that specific and limited sense, these things are superintelligent. While no one, so far as I know, has claimed that these chatbots are superintelligent in the fullest sense (as in Bostrom’s Superintelligence) you see the problem. Don’t you?

Just as we don’t know how the human mind, the human brain, works. So we don’t know how these chatbots, these large language models (LLMs) work. Do they work like we do or not? At some level obviously not. Computer hardware is quite different from biological “wetware” (brains). But when we consider function, that we don’t know. As long as we stick to symbolic behavior, the ability to write natural language, and increasingly to speak it, to write computer code, and to worth with mathematics, our ability to distinguish the real, that is, humans, from the artificial, that is, computers, is problematic. Thus the terms, the concepts, we have inherited from the pre-GPT-3 era are no longer adequate to problems we now face.

That is what makes the question of computer intelligence both so urgent and so deeply problematic. For the moment, I’m fond of a formulation Steven Harnad expressed somewhere on the web: The behavior chatbots exhibit is astonishing when you consider the fact that they don’t understand another. Those words are mind, but the though is Harnad’s. But this formulation is no more than a stop gap.

We need new concepts, and new conceptual framework. That’s easier called for than accomplished. The accomplishment will take an intellectual generation.

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I’ve made this general point, but at greater length and in different terms in a paper I finished in January of 2023: ChatGPT intimates a tantalizing future; its core LLM is organized on multiple levels; and it has broken the idea of thinking.