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

by Max Solomon Bennett

The coevolution of the familiar sensory organs and the familiar brain of vertebrates is not a coincidence—they each facilitated the other’s growth and complexity. Each incremental improvement to the brain’s pattern recognition expanded the benefits to be gained by having more detailed sensory organs; and each incremental improvement in the detail of sensory organs expanded the benefits to be gained by more sophisticated pattern recognition. In the brain, the result was the vertebrate cortex, which somehow recognizes patterns without supervision, somehow accurately discriminates overlapping patterns and generalizes patterns to new experiences, somehow continually learns patterns without suffering from catastrophic forgetting, and somehow recognizes patterns despite large variances in its input.