Kyle Harrison
to-read
A Brief History of Intelligence
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
- Author
- Max Bennett
- Published
- 2023
- Recommended
- Once
A Brief History of Intelligence
Why it’s on the list: Max Bennett reads the brain’s 600-million-year evolution as five breakthroughs — steering, reinforcement learning, simulation, mentalising and language — each a computational problem natural selection solved, then asks which ones today’s AI has and hasn’t reproduced. A single frame that carries both evolutionary neuroscience and the AI question.
Where I heard about it
- Michael Mauboussin — one of his favourite books of 2024, posted December 2024.
Connections
- Evolution · Neuroscience — the two halves of the book’s historical argument.
- Large Language Models — the contemporary systems Bennett measures the five breakthroughs against.
- Michael Mauboussin — the curator whose 2024 list this came from.