A Brief History of Intelligence Quotes

“By self-replicating, DNA finds respite from entropy, persisting not in matter but in information.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“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.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“The physicist Richard Feynman left the following on a blackboard shortly before his death: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“second law of thermodynamics. That unbreakable law of physics which declares that entropy—the amount of disorder in a system—always and unavoidably increases; the universe cannot help but tend toward decay.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“These neuromodulators work in part by directly counteracting the effectiveness of serotonin—reducing the ability of an animal to rest and be content.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“Bilaterians eat by putting food in their mouths and then pooping out waste products from their butts. Radially symmetrical animals have only one opening—a mouth-butt if you will—which swallows food into their stomachs and spits it out. The bilaterians are undeniably the more proper of the two.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“Both Homo erectus and modern humans have a peculiar method of cooling down—while other mammals pant to lower their body temperature”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“In other words”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“This is one reason why model-free reinforcement learning systems are painfully hard to interpret—when we ask”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“The problem is that in complex situations”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“While learning in modern AI systems is not continual”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“If you raise dopamine levels in the brain of a rat”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“The breakthrough of steering required bilaterians to categorize the world into things to approach (“good things”) and things to avoid (“bad things”). Even a Roomba does this—obstacles are bad; charging station when low on battery is good. Earlier radially symmetric animals did not navigate”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“The problem is complexity. The human brain contains eighty-six billion neurons and over a hundred trillion connections. Each of those connections is so minuscule—less than thirty nanometers wide—that they can barely be seen under even the most powerful microscopes. These connections are bunched together in a tangled mess—within a single cubic millimeter (the width of a single letter on a penny)”
― Max Solomon Bennett, Grey Matters

“This book is divided into five parts”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“So we don’t realize it”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“All birds know how to fly. Does this mean that all birds have genetically hardwired knowledge of flying? Well”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“And so”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“By sharing what we see in our imaginations”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“Our unique language”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“Free time is extremely rare in the animal kingdom; most animals have no choice but to fill every moment of their daily calendar with eating”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“The most obvious social behavior of nonhuman primates is grooming—a pair of monkeys will take turns picking dirt and mites from each other’s backs where they can’t reach themselves. In the first half of the twentieth century”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“The motor cortex’s skill in sensorimotor planning enabled early mammals to learn and execute precise movements. When comparing the motor skills of mammals to that of reptiles”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“reinforcing and punishing.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“To Thorndike, this wasn’t all bad. A staunch Darwinist, he was unwavering in his view that there should be common principles in the learning of chickens, cats, dogs, and humans. If these animals shared a common ancestor, then they all should have inherited similar learning mechanisms. By probing how these other animals learned, he believed he might be able to also illuminate the principles of how humans learned.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines

“Extinction events create opportunities for small niches to transform into dominant strategies.”
― Max Solomon Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains – A Neuroscience Framework for Understanding Future Machines