Gort, Robert Wright, and A.I. @3QD [GT-5]

My latest 3 Quarks Daily article is up:

Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright’s The God Test

It’s a review of Robert Wright’s current book, The God Test. It turned out to be a tough slog, more than I’d anticipated.

I started blogging about it well ahead of time. I figured I’d write a half-dozen to ten or so blog posts ahead of time and then wrap things up with the formal review. I wrote some blog posts, but by Tuesday, August 4, less than a week before my article was due, I was still blogging about coming up with an approach and hadn’t gotten around to the various things I wanted to cover in the lead-up. Then the weekend arrived and I had to start writing. So I did, here and then. But things wouldn’t converge. Still, I managed to write something and post it on Sunday afternoon. But I wasn’t happy.

Of course, while sometimes I’m satisfied with my 3QD pieces, that’s not always so. This was just one of those times. But still.

On Monday, when the piece actually appeared, I thought I had one of those situations I often had as an undergraduate. I’d write the term paper, turn it in, and then it would hit me, “this is what I should have done.” The process of writing the piece had taken me to a different intellectual place, one where I saw what had to be done. I had such moments of illumination on Mondey, Tuesday as well. But none of them held.

And so, here I am, still not knowing how I could have done a better job of reviewing that book. On the one hand, I wanted to give it a good review. Wright’s a smart guy, I’ve followed him for a long time, I think his “cosmic perspective” is important and I think his views on international cooperation on AI development are important as well. On the other hand, I don’t think much of his account of how LLMs work, but I just didn’t want to get into that. Yes, I indicated one problem in the review, Wright’s casual treatment of semantic relationships. As I indicated in the review, Bert Idem has discussed other problems. But I see still other problems. And I just didn’t want to get into that morass. Going into that would have swamped the review. (Let me say, moreover, that I think Wright is unnecessarily credulous of the Silicon Valley view of the technology. He should have listened more carefully to Gary Marcus.)

It is what it is.

But I will say this. I am working on my own book in which I present my own “cosmic” view: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. On this I agree with Wright. That is the perspective we need to take. But I approach it in somewhat different terms, terms which I’ve sketched out in a piece I published four years ago, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. Note that in the book length version I do not intend to even try to explain how LLMs function internally. The technology that will take us there – whatever and wherever it is – will necessarily involve different architectures. The last chapter of Play will sketch out the kind of research program I think we need to take us there. Here’s a sketch: Brave New World: Notes on the next 30 years in AI [Work in Progress].

As for explaining how LLMs work, that’s a different project. I don’t intend to work on that. But I am thinking about a book that would be useful to anyone who is interested in that subject. The book I’m imagining would be preliminary to such an account: Language, Memory, and Mind: A Supplement to The Computer and the Brain.

The Mystic Jewels and Matrix Miriam @3QD

I’ve got a new piece out in 3 Quarks Daily:

The Mystic Jewels, the Vatican, and Matrix Miriam

From the introduction:

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. Robinson developed a rich plot in which the financial crisis of 2008 was replayed, but to a different denouement. The banks weren’t bailed out; they were nationalized. Our heroes celebrated by going to Mezzrow’s where they danced “to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard.”

My world. As a musician who’s played RnB, rock, and jazz in many clubs and private parties, that world is more familiar to me than the world of financial derivatives and AI-driven trading, where Robinson centered his story. I decided to take Robinson’s world, move ahead a decade, and center it on the activities of Homo ludens rather than Homo economicus. That gives us Kisangani in the center of the Congo Basin and in 2150.

But this story is much earlier than that. It takes place just a few years from now and is about how the Mystic Jewels started Matrix Miriam, their first in a series of projects to create a new architecture for artificial intelligence. A somewhat revised version will be incorporated into Chapter 6 of my book in progress, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution, where it will be mated with a revised version of “Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising” and some more fictional material.

This is thus is a work of fiction, and science fiction at that. Though the science aspect is a bit light in this piece, I expect it to get more intense as the story unfolds. You can get a glimpse of that in the working paper I developed from that 3QD piece, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper, in the section, “Discussion with Claude about digital doppelgangers,” pp. 10-14. The notion of a digital doppelganger is derived from Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, where the protagonist, Nell, is gifted with an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, when she is four years old. This primer then guides her education into early adulthood.

I am imagining that in the late 22nd century everyone is gifted with a similar resource which is available to and even accompanies them throughout their life. The relationship is so intimate that the doppelganger is in effect a person’s Mirror. But, what happens to the Mirror when the person dies? I haven’t worked that out, but I imagine that it persists for it is (effectively) immortal. I’ll be doing that in that book, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution.

Tyler Cowen, Tycho Brahe & Rank Shift @3QD

I’ve got a new paper at 3 Quarks Daily:

Tyler Cowen is the Tycho Brahe of Economics

It came about as a side effect of my writing and thinking about Cowen’s new monograph, Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026). I was interacting with Marge, the AI attached to the online text of the monograph, when I remarked: “So, he’s the Tycho Brahe of economics.” Marge replied:

That's a sharp analogy. Brahe had the best observational data of his era, ran an extraordinary research enterprise on Hven, trained Kepler who then used Brahe's own data to refute the model Brahe himself believed in. [...] Brahe couldn't make the conceptual leap to heliocentrism despite having everything he needed to do so — his intuitions were too deeply formed in the Ptolemaic rank. But he was indispensable to the transition precisely because of his institutional energy, his data gathering, his willingness to fund and train the next generation.

Emergent Ventures is Hven. Tyler is gathering the data — the people, the ideas, the unconventional bets — that someone with different intuitions will synthesize into a framework he himself can't quite reach. The book is his Tychonic system: a genuine attempt at synthesis that's more sophisticated than what came before, that captures real phenomena, but that preserves the central commitment — equilibrium, marginalism, the whole apparatus — that the next rank will have to abandon.

My first impulse was to put that observation in my introduction to the overall series of blog posts when I gathered them into a single document. But, after thinking things over, I decided that it would be more interesting to write it up as a stand-alone document, one I could publish in 3QD. So that’s what I did.

Now, if you’ve been following the series of blog posts, you know that I write quite a bit about the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed in the 1990s. I didn’t see any need to mention that in the 3QD article, but now that it’s been published I see that it’s quite directly relevant. One problem with the theory as Hays and I wrote about it, is that it’s easy to come away with the idea that the shift from one rank to another is a step function. That’s not at all the case, such shifts take decades and even centuries. But it was all we could do simply to articular the idea of different cognitive ranks.

However, this particular comparison, between Tyler Cowen, an economist in the 21st century, and Tycho Brahe, an astronomer from the 16th century, is about rank shift. Tycho was participating in the transition from a Rank 2 model of the solar system, the geocentric model inherited from Ptolomy, and the Rank 3 model, initiated by Copernicus. Cowen is participating in the shift from Rank 4 economics, which is the focus of his monograph, to a possible Rank 5 economics, which doesn’t quite exist yet. But, who knows what the future will bring?

* * * * * *

You can download a PDF:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/168873753/Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/407286640_Tyler_Cowen_is_the_Tycho_Brahe_of_Economics

Making it strange on the tabletop @3QD

I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily:

What’s a Tablescape? I’m Glad You Asked.

It’s about photos I’ve taken atop tables where I’m eating a meal, mostly breakfast in recent years. The basic rule is that the bottom of the camera must be resting on the top of the table. As a practical matter, I cannot compose these shots with any care. Why not? Because I can’t get my eye down to the camera where I can look through the view-finder (DSLR) or look at the viewscreen (point-and-shoot).

That is to say, not only is there an element of chance in the process – I don’t quite know what image is being captured – but that the resulting image is from a POV that’s not available to me. It’s a world as observed by a creature whose eyes and between an inch and three inches above the surface on which it is standing. Hence the title of this post, “Making it strange on the tabletop.”

“Making is strange” is an old slogan of the modernist avant-garde, with “making it new” as a variant. It’s a doctrine of aesthetic alienation, though alienation is a positive rather than a negative sense. The idea is to bring you closer to the world, to make you more observant, but giving you perspectives you’ve never had, and hence cannot have become habituated too.

The world is a movie for Baby Jesus @3QD

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

My latest article is up at 3 Quarks Daily:

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?

That wasn’t my original title, which was “On Becoming a Secular Mystic, an informal inventory.” Upon reading a draft by friend David Porush suggested the current title, which comes from an anecdote early in the article, which is a collection of anecdotes with thoughts thrown in as the occasion warrants.

The mystical element is there, I report at least one “classical” mystical experience, which was quite powerful and influential, though I can’t say just how it was influential. But there is something about the whole article which resists language – I do include three images, each crafted by ChatGPT. And that got me to thinking, thinking about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

I read that in either my freshman or sophomore year at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1960s. It made a deep impression on me. It was a slender volume, with the original German published on the left and the English translation published on the right; Wittgenstein had insisted on that. It consisted of short statements, sometimes as short as a single line, but also occasionally two or three short paragraphs, even an occasional diagram. Each section was numbered, outline style, from 1 through 7. Here’s the opening proposition, No. 1:

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
The world is everything that is the case.

And here’s the last, No. 7:

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

And here’s the penultimate proposition, sometimes known as Wittgenstein’s ladder, No. 6.4:

Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

The overall effect was mesmerizing. And mystical, certainly. But not in the manner of the experiences reported by mystics, both East and West. This is a different kind of mysticism.

That led me to a dialog with Claude. I asked Claude to summarize it in the third person. I’ve placed the summary below the asterisks.

* * * * *

On Limits, Language, and the Excess of the World

A recent conversation between Bill Benzon and Claude ranged across mystical experience, the philosophy of language, and cosmology, finding unexpected convergences among them.

The conversation opened with the question of why mystical experience is so often described as ineffable. The standard reasons — that language presupposes the distinctions mystical experience dissolves, that it is knowledge of acquaintance rather than description, that it may involve non-ordinary cognition — were surveyed. But Benzon pressed toward something less familiar, noting that ineffability is not unique to mysticism. Tastes, qualia, dreams all resist full verbal capture, each in a different way.

This led to a discussion of Weston LaBarre’s speculation in The Ghost Dance that dreams may have been what first compelled early humans to philosophize. The key insight is that the problem isn’t the strangeness of dream content but the mnemonic residue — waking up with memories of having been somewhere that doesn’t exist in the waking world. That memory demands an account, and the account requires positing another order of reality. Dream epistemology, on this view, is not superstition but careful reasoning from unavoidable evidence.

Benzon then introduced Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, noting its paradoxical status as a founding document of the most rigorously anti-metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy and yet a work with a distinctly mystical frame — opening with “The world is everything that is the case” and closing with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” with the famous ladder metaphor in between. The Tractatus mysticism, the conversation suggested, is different in kind from episodic mystical experience. It is not about a special state of consciousness but about the permanent boundary condition of all language and all saying.

Benzon noted that this Wittgensteinian orientation may be closer to his own secular mysticism than the more conventionally episodic forms — not a transport or vision, but a sustained dwelling at the edge of the articulable.

The conversation then turned to cosmology. The Planck epoch — the earliest moments of the universe, where the distinction between space and time breaks down and the equations of physics lose their meaning — offers a striking parallel. The universe, pressed to its own origin, becomes undescribable by the tools it eventually produced. The very attempt to picture that earliest state smuggles in categories that don’t yet apply.

What converges across all these limits — Wittgenstein’s structural limit of language, the subjective limit of qualia, the ontological puzzle of dreams, the cosmological limit of the Planck epoch — is perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting, structurally and permanently. The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist arrive at adjacent positions by entirely different routes.

The conversation closed with a formulation from Benzon that served as its natural capstone: The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

The Paradox of Contemporary AI @3QD

I’ve got another article at 3 Quarks Daily:

The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure

The title pretty much encapsulates my argument. Yes, LLMs have been a brilliant technical success. But they’ve also led to an intellectual monoculture that narrows the range of ideas on which to draw in moving forward. That, I argue, will make progress much more difficult. I’ve published a longer and more narrowly circumscribed version of that argument on New Savanna, The Shock and the Narrowing: How ChatGPT's Success May Have Compromised AI's Future.

Part of the institutional failure lies in the educational system. Here’s a short note I posted to Facebook that points at that:

I entered Johns Hopkins as a freshman in the fall of 1965. JHU had just gotten Ford Foundation money to establish the interdisciplinary Humanities Center. “Interdisciplinary” was the next Big Thing. In the fall of ‘66 the Humanities Center hosted the (in)famous structuralism conference. And we all know what happened after that. Theory plus Harold ‘Effin’ Bloom.

Since then I believe JHU has acquired two more interdisciplinary humanities centers, but the place is still run by the traditional disciplines. That’s happened all over the place. Interdisciplinary centers and studies programs all over, but it’s all epicycles upon epicycles circling the same old 19th century German categories.

For all that time I’ve heard that too many people are publishing the same damn articles time and again. That problem persists. & I’ve heard that we need to do more to encourage Real Innovation, we always need more of that. But the institutions remain fundamentally the same.

Is there any chance that this is ever going to change? What are the chances that AI will force/allow fundamental change? Or do we have to somehow start anew from the ground up?

AI experts don’t realize how shallow their knowledge is, and neither does anyone else.

Three for 3QD: Man-Machine Collaboration, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, American Heartbreak in Jersey City

Generally when I post an article to 3 Quarks Daily I will follow up with a post here at New Savanna linking to the 3QD piece and extending or commenting on that argument in some way. However, as I’ve indicated in this post, Coming out of melancholy, again, from Feb. 5, I went into psychological hibernation (aka melancholy) last September. While I did manage to post to 3QD during that period, I didn’t post notices here at the Savanna. Here are those notices, belatedly.

* * * * *

Some Hybrid Remarks on Man-Machine Collaboration, September 12, 2025.

That essay touches on a number of things: 10 LLMs as cultural technology, 2) my Fourth Arena concept, 3) Latour on the (false) distinction between nature and culture, and 4) the issue of how proper attribution for hybrid essays (essays where an AI played a significant role). In between 3 and 4 I inserted an essay by ChatGPT.

* * * * *

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Into the Bopi with Steven Spielberg, Oct. 12, 2025.

It’s what its title suggests, an essay review of Spielberg’s film. It’s staged as a science fiction story, but is that really what it is, science fiction? From the article:

On the whole, my sense is that, in making this film Spielberg ventured into the bopi. And just what, pray tell, is that? I have the term from by friend, Charlie Keil. Early in his career he did fieldwork among the Tiv of Nigeria. The bopi is an area that’s set aside for children’s play. Moreover, adults are forbidden to enter the bopi. [...] But the whole film feels like an imaginative bopi. It’s a kid-centric world in which adults are an intrusive presence. [...]

Ultimately the story of E.T. seems to be almost an allegory or metaphor for art itself, a zone apart from the world into which we move to revivify and reconstruct.

* * * * *

American Heartbreak: The ‘Urban Design Studio’ in Jersey City, Nov. 3, 2025.

This is a photo essay about a graffiti site in Jersey City, now demolished.

Chess, Language, and AI @3QD

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Chess and Language as Paradigmatic Cases for Artificial Intelligence

Chess has been a central concern of AI from the beginning. AI researchers didn’t become interested in natural language until the 1970s. Before that computational research on natural language was the domain of computational linguistics (CL), which started with machine translation (of texts from one natural language to another) as its primary problem. Thus we have two different disciplines AI and CL.

In a sense, AI was fundamentally a philosophical exercise. It was an attempt to demonstrate, in effect, that we could understand the human mind in terms of computation. But rather than advance its philosophical objective through argument, it chose computational demonstration as its mode of expression. Chess became a central concern for two reasons: 1) On the one hand it was widely regarded as exhibiting the pinnacle of human reasoning ability. If we could create a computer program to play a championship game of chess, we could create a computer program that would be capable of cognitive or even perceptual task humans can do. 2) But also, the nature of chess made it well-suited for computational investigation.

My article concentrates on this and then goes on to make the point that language is utterly unlike chess in this respect. The chess domain is bounded and well-defined. Natural language is not; it is ill-defined and unbounded.

That’s really as far as I got. Which is OK. But what I was aiming for was an argument that AI is still, in effect, mesmerized by the chess paradigm. I couldn’t quite make it that far. Language is just so obviously different.

What I’ve come to realize, only after I’d finished the article, is that it isn’t so much chess that has mesmerized AI. Rather it is computation itself. AI has been implicitly assuming that the First Principles of intelligence reduce to the First Principles of computing. The first principles of computing can be found in the work of Alan Turing (the abstract idea of computing) and John von Neumann (for the physical implementation of computing).

The first principles of intelligence are more stringent. As Claude put it in our dialog last night:

First principle of intelligence: Must operate in unbounded, geometrically complex physical reality with finite resources.

Those two qualifications, an unbounded, geometrically complex reality, and finite computational resources, change the nature of the problem considerably. I note, in passing, that this allows us to assign formal significance to the concept of embodiment, for it is embodiment that commits intelligence to operating with finite resources in a geometrically complex universe.

Miriam Yevick’s 1975 paper, “Holographic or Fourier Logic,” is the crucial document, but it’s been forgotten. Using identification in the visual domain as her case, she showed that, where we are dealing with geometrically simple objects, sequential symbolic processing is the most efficient computational regime. But when we are dealing with geometrically complex objects, neural net processing is the most efficient computational regime. AI started out with symbolic processing in the 1950s and arrived at neural nets in the 2010s. But it hasn’t explicitly recognized that one must fit the mode of processing to the nature of the world. In that (perhaps a bit peculiar) sense, the researchers in the currently-dominant paradigm don’t know what they’re doing. 

I’ve written a number of blog posts and articles about Yevick’s work. Try these two articles:

Next Year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates], 3 Quarks Daily, October 9, 2023, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/10/next-year-in-jerusalem-the-brilliant-ideas-and-radiant-legacy-of-miriam-lipschutz-yevick-in-relation-to-current-ai-debates.html

What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Working Paper, January 3, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/126773246/What_Miriam_Yevick_Saw_The_Nature_of_Intelligence_and_the_Prospects_for_A_I_A_Dialog_with_Claude_3_5_Sonnet_Version_2

LLMs, hallucinations, and language as cultural technology @3QD

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Of Grammar and Truth: Language Models and Norms, Truth and the World

I start with an obscure topic in linguistics, evidentials, and then move on to so-called hallucinations and into the Gopnik, Farrell, Underwood account of AI as cultural technology. I conclude the article by explaining how I got Claude to create the text and discussed the issues that raises for attribution.

The penultimate section is entitled: What Language Turns Out to Be: Mechanistic. But I never really explain that. I’m going to do that here.

Or rather I’m going to let Claude explain:

The success of modern chess programs and large language models shows that language and reasoning are mechanistic, but not in the familiar steam-engine sense of mechanism. These systems are better understood as machines with trillions of interacting parts, whose behavior emerges from distributed internal dynamics rather than from transparent, human-scale causal chains. Such mechanisms operate autonomously: once set in motion, they carry out sustained symbolic activity without continuous human or animal control. This autonomy is not accidental; it is the defining consequence of scale. Just as early steam locomotives violated pre-industrial ontologies by exhibiting self-propelled motion without life, contemporary computational systems violate inherited ontologies by exhibiting structured linguistic and cognitive behavior without minds. What we are confronting is not the end of mechanism, but the emergence of a new kind of mechanism—one that forces us to revise the categories by which we distinguish agency, control, and understanding.

We decided that steam-engine mechanisms are best called equilibrium machines while machines of a trillion parts are generative machines:

By equilibrium machines I mean mechanisms designed to settle into stable, repetitive behavior, minimizing deviation and surprise. These are the machines of the Industrial Revolution, and they underpin the worldview of Homo economicus. By generative machines I mean mechanisms maintained far from equilibrium, whose internal dynamics produce structured novelty and exploration. Language is the paradigmatic generative machine, and Homo ludens is the form of life that emerges when such machines become central rather than marginal.

The world of Homo economicus is organized around equilibrium mechanisms: machines designed to settle, repeat, and minimize deviation. These are the mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution, whose success shaped not only our technologies but our intuitions about causality, control, and value. Homo ludens inhabits a different world. Its characteristic institutions and practices arise from generative mechanisms—systems maintained far from equilibrium, whose internal dynamics support exploration, play, and the continual production of novelty. Human freedom does not stand opposed to such mechanisms; it depends on them.

This allows me to observe (in Claude’s words:

Human freedom and creativity are not opposed to mechanism. They are grounded in a special class of mechanisms—decoupled, autonomous mechanisms whose internal standards of coherence allow sustained activity independent of immediate worldly constraint. Language is paradigmatic of this class.

That is an idea I’ll be developing in my book, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution.

ChatGPT’s graphics abilities @3QD

I’ve got a new piece out in 3 Quarks Daily:

ChatGPT Makes Images. It’s FUN! (and illuminating)

I open by talking about how I came to buy a Macintosh in 1984 and how that, in turn, led me to publish an article in Byte Magazine, which was the most technically sophisticated of the magazines that were created to serve the home computer market. The article, “The Visual Mind and the Macintosh,” argued that the Mac’s image-making capacity made it especially well-suited as a tool for thinking.

That, however, is not the theme of my 3QD article, which is mostly a rubric for posting various images that I’d created with ChatGPT. I’d originally intended to come back to that theme at the end of the article, but by the time I got there it seemed rather labored an unnecessary. But I’d like to say a little about that here. Then I’m going to talk about what appears to be the “subtext” of the 3QD piece.

Visual Thinking

I did a lot of drawing as a kid. At one point I was drawing flying saucers. After I’d read Tom Sawyer – or was it after my father read it to me before bedtime? – I drew maps for caves. You’ll remember that at one point Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher get lost in a cave and are spooked by Indian Joe.

How do you draw a map for a cave? You just draw a complicated pattern of squiggly lines with only one path from the entrance to some chamber deep in the network. Later on I’d draw hypothetical railroad layouts. That is to say, another network diagram. I also made plans for spacecraft, such as this:

In graduate school I did lots of cognitive network diagrams, like this:

I later went on to write Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution (1989), with Richard Friedhoff. After that I wrote and encyclopedia article about Visual Thinking. There I emphasized the importance of visual thinking in science generally, and computer science in particular.

Joanna Drucker explains the conceptual power of diagrams in Graphesis (2006):

In a landmark 1987 essay, “Why a Diagram Is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words,” Herbert Simon and Jill Larkin argue that a diagram is fundamentally computational, and that the graphical distribution of elements in spatial relation to each other supported “perceptual inferences” that could not be properly structured in linear expressions, whether these were linguistic or mathematical. They state at the outset that “a data structure in which information is indexed by two-dimensional location is what we call a diagrammatic representation.” They argue that the spatial features of diagrams are directly related to a concept of location, and that location performs certain functions. Locations exercise constraints and express values through relations, whether a machine or human being is processing the instructions. Larkin and Simon were examining computational load and efficiency, so they looked at data representations from the point of view of a three part process: search, recognition, and inference. Their point was that visual organization plays a major role in diagrammatic structures in ways that are unique and specific to these graphical expressions. [p. 106]

That’s why I like diagrams. The physical act of making such diagrams is relatively simple. But making them intellectually meaningful, that’s something else. Alas, ChatGPT isn’t up to that yet. But there was no point in saying that in my 3QD piece, which was about something else.

Themes in “ChatGPT Makes Images”

Once I’d settled on the idea of doing an article about images made by ChatGPT the choice of images came quickly. There seems to be a logic there. I start with a painting I did as child, a painting of rockets on Mars. I then showed two renderings that ChatGPT did of that painting, one in the style of a Japanese print and the other in the style of a Byzantine mosaic. That is to say, these are exotic and strange images.

Then I started with a graffiti photo and had ChatGPT use that a cue to images on a search for remnants of a lost civilization (Indiana Jones), a search that eventually led to an alien planet. More exoticism. Then came two images of a Hindu superhero, Kama Carnatica. Still more the exotic.

But then we return to childhood, and early childhood at that, to the world of a four-year-old. I showed a four-panel comic where a young boy tames a tsunami by naming it. Think about that. It doesn’t seem particularly exotic, but it is about taming the unknown by naming. Very human. Very Biblical. Very intellectual.

What happens next? I bring back my Hindu superhero and place her in four very well-known paintings, The Birth of Venus, Mona Lisa, Whistler’s Mother, and Portrait of Madam X. What’s going on, domesticating the exotic by assimilating it to Western art, or othering Western art by making it exotic? Does it matter?

I conclude with three mandalas. The first is an iris. A Georgia O-Keefe iris? Exotic. Then a mandala about written symbols. The final mandala is about my life, with links back to Mars and Kama Carnatica.

There’s a logic there, myth logic.

That four-year old girl

Why did I tell that story about Valerie? This is an article about ChatGPT’s ability to generate images. That story is, at best, tangential to the article. It’s there because it’s part of the prompt I used to generate some images I’ve included in the article.

I note that the whole essay is a bit over 4000 words long, plus the images. That story is introduced a bit after the halfway point; it’s in the middle of the essay. So, in the middle of this essay about strange new technology, that some find to be scary, I place a sweet story about eliciting hugs from a four-year-old girl. That’s followed by a short comic about a little boy who overcomes his fear of a tsunami by using language, by naming it.

On the one hand those cartoon images are just more examples of what ChatGPT can do. I could easily have used other examples. But I chose those. And I’m pretty sure I chose them for they story they tell, though I wasn’t quite conscious of that at the time. And those images, in turn, entailed the story about Valerie.

That purely incidental and peripheral story is thus at the heart of this article. What follows that section of the article? A section about the “whitewashing” of history. To be sure, I’m not (entirely) serious about that whitewashing. But I’m certainly aware that that sort of thing is a charged issue and that the images I produced in that section evoke “cultural appropriation.” I thought seriously about that, and decided to go ahead.

As I’ve said before, there’s a logic there, a cultural logic.

A Second Sexual Revolution @3QD

My latest piece for 3 Quarks Daily is up:

Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/redeeming-pleasure-women-lead-a-second-sexual-revolution.html

I was a bit hesitant about calling it a second sexual revolution as I’ve seen little to nothing about such a revolution in the media. “Could I be imagining things,” thought I to myself. Then, just after I’d finished writing the article I came across Good Sex: Transforming America through the New Gender and Sexual Revolution (2022). There it is, ”revolution.” Catherine M. Roach seems to think one is going on. From the first page of her book:

A cultural revolution unfolds in America.

It emerges from #MeToo activism against sexual misconduct, media campaigns around body positivity, and the increased visibility of people from across the gender and sexuality spectrum. These varied developments stand at the leading edge of a broad shift happening across America and the globe. Together, they herald a welcome revolution for the twenty-first century and a new vision of sexual and gender well-being.

That is certainly what my article is about. I’m not the only one who is talking of revolution. A bit later Roach observes (p. 4):

While a puritanical past shapes America, the twenty-first century has ushered in huge changes, fast. All these transformations, disparate yet interrelated, result in greater cultural acceptance and legal protection for diversity in gender expression and romance. A brave new world opens before us: we live in an era of a new gender and sexual revolution.

This moment builds on the earlier sex-positive revolution of the 1960s and early ’70s, fueled by that era’s counterculture movement and widespread availability of reliable contraceptives. But it adds fresh emphasis on broader inclusion. We increasingly talk about personal identity as shaped through the overlapping intersection of gender and sexuality, as well as categories of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, body size and shape, age, dis/ability status, and more. (Academics term this overlap of aspects of identity intersectionality.) This next-generation revolution makes a deeper commitment to sexual justice through a hard line against sexual misconduct and through informed, affirmative consent. It provides wider freedom from the mandatory gender binary of masculinity or femininity. It celebrates body positivity. And it works to reduce the stigma of slut-shaming and to celebrate “cliteracy” (yup, we’re going to talk about closing the orgasm gap). These transformational shifts are happening through online means unimaginable fifty, or even ten, years ago: digital platforms and social media where people share personal stories to create community and empower activism.

If then, we are in a second sexual revolution, why aren’t more people writing about it as such? The first sexual revolution certainly got plenty of press at the time. I put the issue to Claude. Our conversation makes up the rest of this post. My prompts are set in bold-face type.

* * * * *

I’ve been arguing that we’re having a second sexual revolution. I’ve just completed an article about it which should be online this coming Sunday. But I don’t see anything about a sexual revolution in the media. The first sexual revolution as recognized as such and discussed in those terms. Why isn’t this one being discussed? 

 

Of course, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this – and you should consider that in your reply. But I think there are reasons. No one’s written a book comparable to, e.g. The Feminine Mystique. There’s no Hugh Hefner devoting a major publication to it. The 60s and 70s were a time of general foment and social change, the civil right movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the counter-culture. There’s nothing like that now. Since the turn of the millennium American politics has been dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of woke, and the Obama-to-Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump arc. Plus the internet, social media, and now AI. There’s no room in the public square to talk about a second sexual revolution. 

 

Thoughts?

 

You raise a compelling point about the absence of explicit "sexual revolution" discourse despite potentially significant changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors. Your analysis touches on something important about how social movements get named, recognized, and discussed. 

 

I think you're onto something with the media landscape explanation. The 1960s sexual revolution had clear symbolic figures, landmark publications, and occurred within a broader narrative of social upheaval that made it easy to package as a coherent "revolution." Today's media environment is fragmented - instead of a few major publications setting the cultural conversation, we have countless niche publications, podcasts, and social media discussions that might be covering these changes without creating a unified narrative. 

 

There's also the question of what changes you're identifying as constituting this second revolution. If it's things like shifting attitudes toward non-monogamy, changing gender roles, evolving views on sexual identity, or new relationship structures enabled by technology, these might be happening more gradually and without the dramatic generational conflict that characterized the first sexual revolution.

 

The political context matters too. The first sexual revolution coincided with broader questioning of authority and traditional institutions. Today's political landscape seems more focused on other forms of cultural conflict, and discussions about sexuality often get immediately politicized in ways that might make broad cultural commentary more difficult. 

 

It's also possible that we're in the middle of changes that will only be recognized as revolutionary in retrospect, once we have more historical distance. What specific changes are you arguing constitute this second revolution?

 

I think there’s a bunch of things having to do with behavior and attitudes, which, when taken together strike me as indicating major change. Here’s just one example, from Jane Juska, who was in her late 60s or early 70s when she wrote this: 

Even now I am not entirely at ease, either in my role as a writer, which is as it should be—writers are supposed to stay on edge, so I’ve read—or in my role as a sexpert. Never mind, people talk to me about sex all the time. Not long ago I met Nora, my new best friend, and her best friend, Alicia, in San Francisco, where the two of them had come for a visit. They are both twenty-six years old. They are fans of my book and of martinis, and so I felt free to ask them if they, the two of them, talk about sex. Lord, yes! And before you know it, we are sharing our views on favorite positions and why. Alicia likes to be on top, so we talk about position and power, about physiology and psychology. Nora champions the missionary position: “Hands down, it’s the best.” I loved our conversation. Times, for some of us, have changed for the better.

That’s a major change in attitudes. There’s a lot of that going around. That’s the kind of thing I have in mind. 

 

That's a striking example - the casual, cross-generational nature of that conversation really does suggest something significant has shifted. The fact that a woman in her 70s and two women in their 20s can discuss sexual positions over drinks as easily as they might discuss restaurants or movies points to a normalization of sexual discourse that would have been remarkable even 20-30 years ago. 

Trapped in work-mode @3QD [ultimately coping with AI]

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Trapped in Work Mode: The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It’s Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/trapped-in-work-mode-the-real-challenge-of-ai-is-not-technical-its-conceptual-mythic-and-institutional.html

It’s about how we’ve become trapped in work-mode, a form of behavior that became solidified during the Industrial Revolution, though I don’t talk about how that came about. I open by talking about how my father, a very talented man with man interests spent an enormous amount of time playing solitaire once he’d retired. I then go on to talk about the rise of retirement coaches, professionals who help people adjust to the “rigors” of retirement. It’s as though many have become so “broken to the harness” of work that they are unable to figure out what to do with themselves when their time, once again, is their own. In this situation, I suggest, instituting universal basic income to support people who’ve lost their jobs to AI, that will amount an indirect subsidy of the drug industry.

I go on to suggest that, if we are to flourish under AI, we need to structure our social institutions around something other than work (Homo economicus), which is the current arrangement in the advanced nations. But I do not, in that article, suggest what I have in mind. What I have in mind, of course, is Homo ludens, which I’ve been writing about here and there.

The Industrial Revolution trapped us in work-mode

Consider this passage from Johan Huizinga, Chapter 11, “Western Civilization Sub Specie Ludi,” Homo Ludens, 1938:

The 19th century seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare-all fatal to the Baroque-had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler-suit. Henceforth the dominants of civilization were to be social consciousness, educational aspirations, and scientific judgement. With the enormous development of industrial power, advancing from the steam-engine to electricity, the illusion gains ground that progress consists in the exploitation of solar energy. As a result of this luxation of our intellects the shameful misconception of Marxism could be put about and even believed, that economic forces and material interests determine the course of the world. This grotesque over-estimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism after they had killed the mysteries and acquitted man of guilt and sin. But they had forgotten to free him of folly and myopia, and he seemed only fit to mould the world after the pattern of his own banality.

Thus the 1 9th century seen from its worst side. But the great currents of its thought, however looked at, were all inimical to the play-factor in social lif e. N either liberalism nor socialism off ered it any nourishment. Experimental and analytical science, philosophy, reformism, Church and State, economics were all pursued in deadly earnest in the 1 9th century. Even art and letters, once the "first fine careless rapture" of Romanticism had exhausted itself, seemed to give up their age-old association with play as something not quite respectable.

Beyond the human

Someone calling himself John Doe left a helpful and insightful comment:

I would like to propose that it misses the non-human-but-still-life perspective. I believe it to be essential for human flourishing in the long run. Physically and mentally. Humans usually define themselves in relation to other humans, sometimes animals, much rarer other lifeforms. Most of us believe they care about those and yet on a planetary scale (which is by definition not the human scale but still relevant for most humans to flourish) we are arguably in a predicament. Which leads me to the conclusion that it would be helpful to find a way to support flourishing for more lifeforms with less use of resources in absolute terms. This will be a very tall order which some, possibly many, will knowingly or unknowingly but nevertheless actively, refuse. Sometimes violently. It will also become much more of a question of cooperation and healthy competition on many levels.

I would argue that deliberate contemplation, meditation, care work in a broad sense (not only human-centric) should be encouraged. To be very pragmatic about it, maybe it'd make sense to set up community spaces that enable contemplation/meditation in some sort of social group.

My first band @3QD [I’m a musician]

I’ve got a new article up at 3 Quarks Daily: White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond.

I think of the The Saint Matthew Passion is the first I played in. Strictly speaking, no, it’s not the first. I played in marching band, concert band, and “stage” band in middle school and high school – which I discuss briefly in the article. But they weren’t MY bands in the sense that I was a founding member of the band, which was thus the creation and “property” of us founders. No, those were institutional bands, established by the school. They were good bands. I enjoyed playing in them. I learned a lot.

But they weren’t mine. The Saint Matthew Passion was. To be sure, I didn’t start the band. I was recruited to it by Jon Siskind, who started it along with some of his friends. They recruited others as well. There were seven us, four in the rhythm section and three horns. I was one of the horns.

The band was modeled after Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and Chicago (then Chicago Transit Authority). The idea was to blend jazz with rock by adding a small horn section to a standard rock rhythm section. Just what I was looking for.

* * * * *

This was back in 1969-71, when I was at Johns Hopkins. I’ve written quite a number of articles about that period in my life, which you can find by clicking this link: Baltimore_Years. One of these days I’ll write a post where I say a bit about each one of those articles and perhaps add a thing or two to place them in context among one another.

But I would like to say one more thing. Though I’d been playing music since I was ten, and had been serious about it since I was 13, I didn’t think about myself as a musician. Rather, I was a guy who played music, a lot. “Musician” wasn’t an identity I assumed.

That changed during my Baltimore period. One evening I was talking with Gren Whitman, a friend maybe 10 years older. He’s Mr. Alpha in my recent post, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s. I don’t know quite how it came about, but he told me, “No, William” – didn’t normally call me that, no one did or does, but in that situation, he did, I can even hear the faint echo of his voice in my mind’s ear – “no, William, you ARE a musician.” Just like that: “You are a musician.” I don’t think he explained – though he may have said something, nor did I ask him to, the declaration was enough. Ever since then I’ve thought of myself as a musician.

It was a simple gift, but powerful: Thanks, Gren.

My new-found patriotism @3QD

Here’s my latest 3QD article: Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. The opening paragraphs:

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. They’ve highjacked America. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now...well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.

Then the essay. I begin by pointing out that “patriotism” is an abstract thing:

You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.

I then introduce a definition from Claude 3.7. It ends by asserting:

Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

The rest of the essay is about how I have experienced and expressed my patriotism at various points in my life. I start with the childhood, where I said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, pointing out that the abstract words in the pledge – allegiance, republic, liberty, justice – probably didn’t become meaningful until my adolescence. Before that, just word forms devoid of substantial meaning.

Then I have sections on becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, travelling to a Mennonite college, Goshen College, to talk about my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), finally on Project Apollo, the moon landing in 1969. That’s all about how I became attached to the abstract ideas on which the United States of America was founded. When I talk of attachment I mean, fundamentally, the biological mechanisms by which infants become attached to their mothers.

I learned about attachment when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology from Mary Ainsworth and then went on to do an independent study with her. Attachment was the subject. She was one of the co-founders of attachment theory. She’d worked with John Bowlby, the first founder, and then done field research in Uganda where she looked at how infants became attached to their mothers. She introduced me to Bowlby’s Attachment (1969) before the manuscript had been published and had me read some of the early ethological studies of primate behavior in the wild.

However, it is one thing for infants to become attached to their mothers, and mothers to their infants. That’s done by biological mechanisms. How then can those same mechanisms be directed toward abstract objects, like nations in the case of patriotism. As far as I can tell, not much is known about that, though there has been some work. Clearly extensive cultural mechanisms are involved.

My 3QD article isn’t about those mechanisms. Rather, it shows the kinds of behavior that are made possible through those mechanisms. If you want a glimpse of the mechanisms, I have a long and complex paper that examines how they operate in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

Women’s Hands at 3QD

Back in October of 2021 I published this in 3 Quarks Daily: In Praise of Women’s Hands. I was in a down phase at the time and so didn’t post about it here at New Savanna. So here’s the post I should have done, but didn’t – there are more of those. There always are.

Here are the three opening paragraphs:

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 the dishwasher, the oven, the vacuum cleaner, and the sewing machine.

I would like to praise that cradle-rocking hand, even, in a sense, in its cradle-rocking mode. This cradle-rocking hand, we have been led to believe, is better at delicate manual tasks – I learned that as a child – than are men’s hands, the hands that shoot the guns, pilot the ship of state, and keep charge of the shackles connecting that associated foot to those many domestic appliances. That’s what I’m interested in, this hand with its delicate and versatile ability to make things, to make a world.

The groove before the machine @3QD

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily: One thought for living in a high-tech world: The groove before the machine. It’s a strange one, for me, more aphoristic, metaphorical, and polemical, than actually argued. Not sure how I’d argue it. Not even sure what IT is.

Not what I started to write

I started to write an article explaining these three maxims:

1. The groove before the machine.

2. To drive a car, get in the driver’s seat.

3. The machine is useful in proportion to the user’s skill, knowledge, and experience.

As I started writing, my account of the first maxim took on a life of its own and I didn’t see how I could work the other two in. So, I took the article in a different direction:

We’re living in a mismatched world

This is where (I think) I was going:

Our basic institutions and norms are grounded in late Industrial Revolution social and political technology. That’s radically different from the technology that's been barreling in on us since the internet became the world-wide web. AI is just going to magnify that. What we’re now seeing in Silicon Valley and in Washington, DC., that’s what happens when 21st century high tech meets 19th century Gilded Age institutions. Not pretty.

Those mega-corporations now burning through billions investing in machine learning and preparing to dump 100s of billions into electrical infrastructure: 19th century. The school system, the institutional sector I know best: 19th century. The lock-step grade system in the primary schools was designed to send young adults into factories, standardized factories. The yawning gulf between the sciences and humanities in higher ed, that’s out of 19th century Germany. Chatbots make a hash out of that.

This mismatch is a disaster in the making.

I didn’t get there. Truth be told, I don’t quite know how. Instead a told a story about the hassle involved in trying to get a customized cover for a book I’d recently bought, Reid Hoffman’s Superagency: What Could Possibly Right with Our AI Future. They wanted me to upload a photo of myself but wouldn’t accept any of the photos I offered. It was frustrating, especially because I didn’t care all that much about the photo, so why should they make such a fuss about it? This reminded me of the hassle Facebook gave me and a bunch of other people about changing their interface, something I’ve blogged about under the heading, “Facebook or Freedom.”

Anyhow, getting back to Reid Hoffman’s customized book cover – the very idea of a customixed book is born out of 19th century standardizing culture. Who knows what will replace it.

And that, more or less, is where I left things. Kinda’ hanging, no?

Next time.

I talk Loony Tunes with John McWhorter @3QD

I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily:

John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons

That went up yesterday. 

Today Brooks Riley followed up with this:

There's a lesson there: Cartoons play the court jester to the dominant view of reality.

I ended the article with a scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one where Daffy Duck and Donald Duck battle one another at the piano. Such battles were common in cartoons. Here’s another one:

Here's a variation on the theme:

 

 

 Have fun!

Beyond prediction: Yes, we need to work on societal resilience, but we need to work on intellectual resilience as well.

Just around the corner from here Malcolm Murray has a nice article in 3 Quarks Daily, O3 and the Death of Prediction. Here’s some excerpts from his article:

A lot of the focus over the past years has been to try to pinpoint when AI will be able to do certain tasks. Various surveys have been run estimating when AI will be able to write a best-selling novel or win math competitions. [...] The real game is to prepare for advanced AI capabilities, whether they are called AGI or not. o3 shows two things clearly – that AI evolution seems set to continue apace, and that we can not predict it and should not attempt to.

Note that the death of prediction in the AI space does not mean the death of forecasting. Forecasting will still have its place. Whereas prediction is the non-scientific, crystal ball, finger-in-the-air activity beloved by media pundits, forecasting is a more scientific endeavor, which will still be valuable. Forecasting, especially in the form invented by Philip Tetlock – Superforecasting (disclosure: I am a Superforecaster) – means careful thinking regarding the applicability of historical base rates and adjusting them based on clear current trends. This can yield still very accurate forecasts of future events, at least a few years out.

But the fields of AI safety and AI risk management should turn their focus to resilience. Normally in risk management, risks are analyzed by their potential impact as well as their probability and their likely time to materialize. Focusing on resilience, however, means putting aside the probability and time frame and focusing on the impact. This is a different mindset. It is saying that we don’t know if or when this risk will arise, but if the impact of the risk is large enough, we should make adequate preparations regardless. Preparation takes time, so it is high time to start.

I wrote a rather long reply:

I agree with you, we can’t predict, and we should certainly give more attention to societal resilience, much more attention. But I’d like to say a word in defense of Marcus and co. Because we need more than societal resilience. We also need intellectual and technological resilience. Marcus is certainly calling for that.

Marcus has studied human cognition and language. Many (of us) skeptics have. They know something about how the mind works. These deep learning folks, not so much as far as I can tell. They don’t even know how their very clever devices work – and, if you’ve been reading 3QD, you know I’m a fan of those clever devices. I use them all the time myself.

It’s like a whaling voyage captained by someone who knows everything there is to know about their ship and seamanship, but little to nothing about whales. Just because they can make their ship do fancy and unexpected things doesn’t mean that sooner or later they’re going to find a whale. Nor does it mean you should discount those who actually know something about whales but may not be so enamored of fancy ships.

Predicting technology developments is very difficult, as you point out. No one can do it. Predicting in the AI space, broadly considered, has been going on for a long time. And it’s failed before. Let's take a quick and crude look at that history.

Back in the early days of computing the federal government spent a lot of money for research on computer systems that could translate natural language. They were specifically interested in translating technical documents from Russian to English. This was the 1950s and 60s and the Cold War was in high gear. So researchers made promises, and promises, and promises, and by the early 1960s those promises were looking pretty thin. So a commission was appointed to study the problem. They arrived at two conclusions: 1) There is no immediate prospect of high-quality machine translation. 2) We now have theories and models we didn’t have when this work started. More theoretical research looks promising. As you can imagine, the government paid attention to the first conclusion and ignored the second. The field of machine translation was dead for lack of funds. But not completely dead. It rebranded itself as computational linguistics and continued on.

My teacher, David Hays, was one of those first generation researchers. He headed the program at the RAND corporation. He was on the commission that made those recommendations. And he’s the one who coined the term “computational linguistics,” which is how the field rebranded itself.

In the mid-1980s pretty much the same thing happened with AI. We had the so-called AI Winter. The work was going well, commercial ventures were started. But the desired/expected results weren’t forth-coming.

I figure that the so-called “design space” for this technology is huge. The early researchers in machine translation explored one region of the space, and ultimately failed. Call it Region Alpha. A bit later other researchers explored another region of the space, and they too failed. Call it Region Beta. The unexpected success of AlexNet in 2012 opened up a whole new region of the design space, one made available by the use of GPUs. Call this Region Gamma. The unexpected success of GPT-3 showed us new areas within this new Gamma region. The same with o3.

I think what Marcus and others are saying is that AGI, whatever it is, isn’t going to be found in Region Gamma. It’s in some other region. Why are they saying that? Because they know, we know, something about language and cognition and don’t believe it is to be found in Region Gamma. And while you're at it, read a paper Miriam Yevick published back in 1975; she knew something back then that I don't think even Marcus knows about. Will the grail of AGI be found in the next region, Delta, or will it be Epsilon, Zeta...? Who knows.