Play Book Tag discussion

A Brief History of Intelligence: Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of Ai by Max Solomon Bennett - 4* - My Review

This is a book of evolutionary neuroscience, starting with the primordial soup and proceeding through time to the modern human brain. The author focuses on the five big breakthroughs in the development of human intelligence and correlates them to what is currently happening in the development of artificial intelligence. The five breakthroughs include: directional movement, learning through positive and negative reinforcement, imagining various outcomes before selecting a course of action, social learning (including mimicking and anticipating future needs), and the development of communication through language.

The author outlines these breakthroughs in an accessible manner. The book is well organized and logically explained. It requires the reader’s keen interest in neuroscience. It is not a book to pick up on a whim. Even though the title mentions “a brief history,” be prepared to go into detail about each breakthrough. I particularly enjoyed the explanations of how artificial intelligence currently performs in each of the five areas. Perhaps I should not be surprised at how much behavioral psychology is included, and I was familiar with many of the experiments mentioned. If you are interested in a journey through the evolution of the human brain, this book will fill the bill. It will be interesting to see how closely AI will be able to mimic the real thing. So far, it is not even close.