Bill Benzon is an independent scholar working on mind and culture. He published Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture in 2001 and is on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. He has taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published widely on literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, African-American music, and technical communication. He also plays trumpet and has shared the stage with Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, Frank Foster, Al Grey, and Nick Brignola. He blogs at New Savanna. Email: bbenzon [at] mindspring.com
by William Benzon The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026) is Robert Wright’s sixth book. It builds on themes and concerns in the previous five books, which I’ll get to at the end. As the title indicates The God Test is about artificial intelligence. Until OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022…
by Bill Benzon 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…
William Benzon Tycho Brahe was a significant figure in my family. Why? Because my father’s parents were from Denmark, and Tycho Brahe was Danish. Danes were thus important in the Benzon household, as was Danish pastry (wienerbrød, Vienna bread), the real stuff with cardamom seeds, not the fluff you get in diners. And then there…
by William Benzon The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn’t know that when I coined the term earlier this year. I’ve been taking photos of my meals for several years now. Every now and then I’d sit the camera on the table and take a shot.…
by William Benzon If I had been born as an Australian Aborigine, or an American Indian, I’d probably have been a shaman. If I’d been born in ancient India, Greece, Israel, or medieval Europe, I might well have been a priest. If I’d been born in colonial America, I might have been a clergyman; Harvard,…
by William Benzon OpenAI released GPT-3 in June of 2020, though not to the general public. Those who had access to it were variously impressed or stunned: Is this it? Is AI really coming at long last? Though I was not in the direct access circle, I had indirect access and was deeply impressed, using…
by William Benzon The digital computer emerged out of devices that were built during World War II for cracking codes and calculating artillery tables. Almost as soon as the computer came into existence people were thinking about using it for chess and language. Alan Turing developed Turochamp, an algorithm for playing chess in 1948. Though…
by William Benzon This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there’s a much shorter section in which I explain how…
by William Benzon Jersey City is a medium-size city on the West bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan. Up through the middle of the 20th century it was a port and a railroad hub but that disappeared when containerized freighter became too deep to travel that far up New York Bay. Without…
by William Benzon I didn’t see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when it came out in 1982, but I was certainly aware of it. It was an unexpected smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, at least for a while. At this point I don’t remember why I didn’t go…
by William Benzon When ChatGPT was released late in November of 2022 my immediate response was, “meh.” But then I decided that I needed to check it out, if only out of curiosity. Within an hour or so my reaction went from “meh” to “hot damn!” I put it through its paces in various small…
by William Benzon Sometime in 1984, after Apple had released the first Macintosh, my friend Rich sent me a short note he’d written on one. The note had some text, not much, nor do I remember about what, and a black and white image of Japanese woman that Apple had put on the over of…
by William Benzon Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not…
by William Benzon I have been thinking about artificial intelligence and its implications for most of my adult life. In the mid-1970s I conducted research in computational semantics which I used in analyzing Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 129, “Th’ Expense of Spirit.” In the summer of 1981 I participated in a NASA study investigating ways to…
by William Benzon The Saint Matthew Passion – yes, I know, by Bach – was a rock band I played in back in the ancient days, 1969 through 1971, when I was working on a master’s degree in Humanities at Johns Hopkins. Before I can tell you about that band, however, I want to tell…
by William Benzon “Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.” –Mark Twain Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have…
by William Benzon Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to…
by William Benzon That’s a highly condensed form of an idea that began with this thought: You have no business making decisions about the deployment of technology if you can’t keep people on the dance floor for three sets on a weekday night. There are a lot of assumptions packed into that statement. The crucial…
by William Benzon It began at The New Republic. I don’t know just why I did it, but I bought a subscription to that magazine the year I went off to college. I remember when Robert Wright was there and I remember when he published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), which was about…
by William Benzon On the one hand, nothing has changed since August 2020, when I wrote GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. I argued that, yes, GPT-3 marks a major technological breakthrough, one that may transform the way we live. But this technology is not sufficient. It is not deep enough. If we’re not…