Brief History of Intelligence
Equal parts Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence, but wholly original in scope, A Brief History of Intelligence offers a paradigm shift for how we understand neuroscience and AI. Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five "breakthroughs" in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow. In the last decade, capabilities of artificial intelligence that had long been the realm of science fiction have, for the first time, become our reality. AI is now able to produce original art, identify tumors in pictures, and even steer our cars. And yet, large gaps remain in what modern AI systems can achieve--indeed, human brains still easily perform intellectual feats that we can't replicate in AI systems. How is it possible that AI can beat a grandmaster at chess but can't effectively load a dishwasher? As AI entrepreneur Max Bennett compellingly argues, finding the answer requires diving into the billion-year history of how the human brain evolved; a history filled with countless half-starts, calamities, and clever innovations. Not only do our brains have a story to tell--the future of AI may depend on it. Now, in A Brief History of Intelligence, Bennett bridges the gap between neuroscience and AI to tell the brain's evolutionary story, revealing how understanding that story can help shape the next generation of AI breakthroughs.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
12mentions
12people
2023–2026years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yeah, I learnt about this from the amazing Max Bennett book: A brief history of intelligence.
- A brief history of intelligence by Max Bennett..I like it so far, I've learned a lot about the brain
- The human genome contains around 1.5GB of information and DeepSeek v3 weighs in at around 800GB, so it's a bit apples-to-oranges. As you say, what's been evolved over hundreds of millions of years is the learning apparatus and architecture, but we largely learn online from there (with some built-in behaviours like reflexes). It's a testament to the robustness of our brains that the overwhelming majority of humans learn pretty effectively. I suspect LLM training runs are substantially more volatile (as well as suffering from the obvious data efficiency issues).
If you'd like an unsolicited recommendation, 'A Brief History of Intelligence' by Max Bennett is a good, accessible book on this topic. It explicitly draws parallels between the brain's evolution and modern AI.
- Complications and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Made me appreciate modern medicine more. One other l book that shifted my thinking completely about AI and how far we are from AGI: A Brief History Of Intelligence by Max Bennett. Evolution is a heck of an algorithm.
Also read Apple In China. Was pretty interesting to realize how much Apple (and China) are what they are because of how much they poured into each other
- You might enjoy chapter 3, 'Origin of Emotion' of a book entitled 'A Brief History of Intelligence' by Max Bennett. Although you need to read the two chapters leading up to it, realistically.
- You're welcome.
If you are interested in more background on biological brains, c.elegans is really just "the very first breakthrough" (in the phraseology of Max Bennett's A Brief History Of Intelligence -- a recent, worthwhile popular science book).
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