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

by Max Solomon Bennett

Each breakthrough was possible only because of the building blocks that came prior. Steering was possible only because of the evolution of neurons earlier. Reinforcement learning was possible only because it bootstrapped on the valence neurons that had already evolved: without valence, there is no foundational learning signal for reinforcement learning to begin. Simulating was possible only because trial-and-error learning in the basal ganglia existed prior. Without the basal ganglia to enable trial-and-error learning, there would be no mechanism by which imagined simulations could affect behavior; by having actual trial-and-error learning evolve in vertebrates, vicarious trial and error could emerge later in mammals. Mentalizing was possible only because simulating came before; mentalizing is just simulating the older mammalian parts of the neocortex, the same computation turned inward. And speaking was possible only because mentalizing came before; without the ability the infer the intent and knowledge in the mind of another, you could not infer what to communicate to help transmit an idea or infer what people mean by what they say. And without the ability to infer the knowledge and intent of another, you could not engage in the crucial step of shared attention whereby teachers identify objects for students.