A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

by Max Bennett

★ 4.46 (929) • 2023

Amazon Audible Goodreads

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“Studying the brain is both tantalizing and infuriating. One inch behind your eyes is the most awe-inspiring marvel of the universe. It houses the secrets to the nature of intelligence, to building humanlike artificial intelligence, to why we humans think and behave the way we do.”

“What separates you from an earthworm is not the unit of intelligence itself—neurons—but how these units are wired together.”

“Gastrulation, neurons, and muscles are the three inseparable features that bind all animals together and separate animals from all other kingdoms of life.”

“Dopamine is not a signal for pleasure itself; it is a signal for the anticipation of future pleasure.”

“The importance of curiosity in reinforcement learning algorithms suggests that a brain designed to learn through reinforcement, such as the brain of early vertebrates, should also exhibit curiosity.”

“Extinction events create opportunities for small niches to transform into dominant strategies.”

“However, the most critical advantage of planning in mammalian brains over modern AI systems like AlphaZero is not their ability to plan with continuous action spaces, incomplete information, or complex rewards, but instead simply the mammalian brain’s ability to flexibly change its approach to planning depending on the situation.”

“Early primates made this same evolutionary trade-off—they evolved to live in groups, accepting the risk of aggression for the benefit of the better predator avoidance of large groups.”

“By self-replicating, DNA finds respite from entropy, persisting not in matter but in information.”

“The more we understand about our own minds, the better equipped we are to create artificial minds in our image. The more we understand about the process by which our minds came to be, the better equipped we are to choose which features of intelligence we want to discard, which we want to preserve, and which we want to improve upon.”

Related videos

10:00

Video chat with author Max Bennett

11K 416

Feb, 2024

Spoiler: The interviewer offers a quick review of the book, noting that it covers five big themes regarding how the human brian evolved: steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing, and speaking. He pages through the book, showing some of the illustrations. He then cuts to the video call with Bennett, who talks about how the brain perceives things that are not there, for example a triangle that is merely suggested by some surrounding shapes. They discuss how intelligence is measured, emphasizing that it’s very difficult to measure accurately.

118:43

Author discusses book's five main points via video

8K 246

Feb, 2024

Spoiler: Nathan from the Cognitive Revolution channel chats with author Max Bennett. The author says that what makes his book unique is that it brings together three different fields of study: evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. In merging these fields, the book tries to craft a first approximation for how the brain came to be and to look for insights as to how to continue building AI. They discuss the “five breakthroughs” of the book’s title: steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing, and speaking.

87:30

Brain Inspired chats with author Max Bennett via video call

7K 173

Dec, 2023

Spoiler: Paul from Brain Inspired gives a brief overview of the book before talking with Max Bennett about the author’s long journey of looking at all of comparative psychology, comparing it to all the work in evolutionary neurobiology, and then mapping all of that to concepts of artificial intelligence. He discusses the ability to simulate, that is, to imagine a state of the world that is not its current state. They compare the brains of fish to those of mammals, noting that fish do not have a neocortex yet they do intelligent things; therefore, why did the neocortex evolve? He says that fish studies are not given enough credit.

46:00

Max Bennett speaks live with slideshow

799 34

Jun, 2024

Spoiler: Bennett talks about his background in AI and says he was fascinated by the differences between the human brain and AI systems, eventually stepping down from his full-time job to spend several years researching human and animal brains, which led to the writing of this book. He asks the question “Why does understanding the brain matter to AI?” and asserts that there are still things that ChatGPT cannot do that even a rat brain can do, such as common-sense reasoning. He also says that generative AI costs far too much energy.

Follow the author

Max Bennett, an entrepreneur and researcher from New York City, is the co-founder and CEO of Alby, a startup that helps companies integrate large language models into their websites. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Product Officer of Bluecore, a leading AI technology provider. Bennett holds several patents for AI technologies and has published numerous scientific papers on evolutionary neuroscience and the neocortex. He has been featured on Forbes' 30 Under 30 and Built In NYC’s 30 Tech Leaders Under 30 lists.

Publications

Independent UK: Book Review: ‘A Brief History of Intelligence’ may help humans shape the future of AI

TLS UK: Modelling the mind. Why AI fails to crack the code of human consciousness

Irish Examiner: Author Max Bennett explains to JP O'Malley why the evolution of the brain holds the key to the future of AI

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