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Price: $12.99
(as of Jul 26, 2024 21:25:44 UTC – Details)
By: Max Bennett (Author)
“I found this book amazing. I read it through…
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
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walter R dejean –
interesting read. opens doors to understanding possibilities
Pros:* The books was interesting, fact based and fairly easy to understand.Pros* His postulates and claims were backed by solid physical or scientific evidence (very important for me)*.if a claim had weak support he pointed it out to keep the discussion open and honestCons* in my opinion made some over the top assumptions about the future of AI.Overall this book is a HUGE MUST READ!!!!*.
Susan –
Beautifully researched and thought out!
Sheer pleasure to read though the biology bits in the first three sections were a bit of a challenge to a non-biologist like me. So carefully researched in every paragraph, every sentence. This book makes me want more! Max, what are you up to next?
A M –
Lovely speculations about the brain and computers
The book speculates about the evolution of intelligence among biological creatures. It also points out similarities between biological and computerized processes, such as biological learning vs. machine learning. The last chapter criticizes the idea that Chat GPT thinks like human beings.
Andro Giorgadze –
This is is so well written and illuminating
I think this is going to be my favorite book of the year. Where to being ? It is the most lucid expiation of how intelligence developed on our planet. It is important to understand the steps in evolution and to see how each advancement was crucial helps you understand the subject more thoroughly. Do not hesitate , just get his book if you are interested in the topic of intelligence.
Richard Böhnel –
the best popular science book for me
Apt, well organized, well supplemented with illustrations, short links, does not use school clichés of university professors or unnecessary texts of media editors, very comprehensive for interesting information. Great.
A. Menon –
Eye opening work on the brain, its hierarchy of reinforcement learning and emergent intelligence
This is the best book I have read in a long time. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but this exceeded all expectations and for me is in the must read category for the interested reader but in particular for those curious about AI, neuroscience and any part the spectrum between those fields. The work is ultimately an aggregation of results from neuroscience and computer science in a synthesis attempting to frame how brain functioning has evolved, how those cognitive functions developed led to a variety of physical manifestations allowing for our theory of mind and language and how these were not inevitable. This is not a work of neuroscience but is woven into break throughs in computer science and machine learning in particular. I know of no other book like this but wish there were more, it is an impressive overview of remarkable fields and interweaves their results with mastery.We live in remarkable times for technology but often forget how much more remarkable the brain is and not strictly for homo sapiens. The author starts at the beginning of life and describes how mobility became a competitive advantage and how such physical mechanisms provided the basis for early adaptive learning benefits for early multi-cellular objects and were fundamentally distinct from multicellular objects stuck in place like corals. From simple bipedal movement the author incrementally moves on to a story of evolution and the strategies employed to drive evolution forward. The earlier parts of the book are mainly about how simple neuron patterns formed that created positive and dampening feedback loops to stimuli and many famous early experiments are detailed that were critical for neuroscience to make progress on the nervous system. The author moves on to evolutionary gains in the brain as adding more supervision to the instinctual networks formed in the basal ganglia and likened them to supervised learning with a teacher. The author gives the reader computer science history lessons with the breakthroughs made in machine learning techniques that coincidentally seem to match what mammalian brains do now through their layered hierarchy and how such techniques allowed for solving of very difficult problems when rewards can often have a long time to emerge from actions taking. This phenomenon of the credit assignment problem is discussed and the author provides the reader with an overview of how our minds have parts of the brain seemingly dedicated to solving this problem.The author discusses how the large extinction event several hundred million years ago from what was almost certainly a large asteroid hitting the planet catalyzed the era of mammals and the evolution of the mammalian brain to which we all owe our current states of mind. The author describes how the neo-cortex evolved and some of the functions which provide a theory of mind that allowed for planning as well as tool building for multi-step optimization. The author interweaves the current state of machine learning and deep learning techniques highlighting similarities and differences. The current lack of internal representation of the world in language models is deemed to be a deficiency vs the way the brain works with its layers creating more complex models of the world (ie operating environment for the body). The human brain has uniquely created extensions of the neo-cortex associated with language and such a functionality has allowed for the effective hive mind of humanity where our knowledge scales with language lowering the friction on communicating what is in our heads. There are a number of neuroscience case studies weaved in about brain defects that impact a variety of cognitive abilities and such examples highlight the utility of certain functionalities but also that the mind has plasticity such that few parts of the brain are absolutely needed without substitution.There is really too much information in this book to really summarize quickly but the picture the author gives is a highly illuminating perspective on the mind, how it has evolved, what have been the ingredients of its intelligence and how there have been layers of abstraction and hierarchical modeling that have gotten us to where we are. Almost as importantly the author runs a parallel track of machine learning advances, how many mimic evolutionary advances in the brain and how such current models have closed many gaps but still have much ground to cover to effectively have a model of the world in which the questions being asked of them are simulated rather than merely inferred from a trained dataset. There are no claims on where the boundaries are and this is not a book about the limits of technology nor its inevitable dominance. It is a remarkable overview of extremely complex and interwoven results that are making major strides that we are witnessing in real time. This really is a must read.
Bill –
Excellent book
The author does not claim to be a trained PhD in neuroscience. But he does claim to know about neuroscience, to have worked with neuroscientists and to have published papers on neuroscience. I think I have caught a few minor (and largely irrelevant) mistakes. I found the book extremely thought provoking. He approaches neuroscience in a way that seems novel. He attempts to understand how the brain works based on insights from evolution and comparative anatomy and from his experience with artificial intelligence. He discussed 5 breakthroughs that occurred along the evolutionary path that led to the development of human intelligence in light of the progress that has been made in artificial intelligence. To me, the approach seems quite sensible. I am about half-way through the book. I also listened to an interview he gave on the podcast “brain inspired”. My assessment is that this is a very serious book that is relatively easy to read. I am not a neuroscientist, so perhaps his thoughts are not as novel as they appeared to me to be. I feel, however, that I am getting more from the book than from most of the more philosophical books that I have read (or tried to read) on the subject.
Dave –
Informative, fascinating and meaningful
If you took everything you knew about brain evolution, threw in a bunch of stuff you didn’t know, reviewed advancements in artificial intelligence, and wrapped it up a fascinating story that you can’t put down, that would be this book. It’s one of those reads that’s fun, educational, and impactful. It’s a book that makes light bulbs go off. Loved every bit of it.
Malcolm Sharpe –
“A Brief History of Intelligence” is the brain book I’ve always wanted. It has a big scope and is not afraid to simplify to make that possible. It also mostly does its best to stick to presenting science as currently understood without letting caveats damage readability.The book is at its most enjoyable when recounting evolutionary history and well-understood mechanisms. For example, its discussion of mass extinctions was a good read, and the explanations of the mechanisms involved in neurons, steering, and trial-and-error learning were understandable. It also has the best exposition of dopamine and serotonin that I’ve seen anywhere.The mechanistic expositions are satisfying for early vertebrates and earlier, but they unfortunately begin lacking when reaching mammals and beyond, which I assume is because those mechanisms aren’t sufficiently well-understood yet. Still, I’m glad they were included to the extent possible.The book left me with an appreciation for the diversity of accumulated techniques at play in the human brain, while also making it seem possible to one day achieve a thorough understanding of the whole organ. It also provides much-needed background for the debate over what today’s AI can and can’t do.
prasid s –
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Johan Widen –
Boken är en pedagogisk sammanställning av dagens vetenskap om hjärnans utveckling, och även om hur människor fick språkförmåga.Den är skriven populärvetenskapligt, för att vara tillgänglig för alla läsare, och kräver inga förkunskaper.Jag tycker boken är lättläst och intressant, den är inget man vill lägga ifrån sig.