Bridges the gap between AI and neuroscience by telling the story of how the brain came to be.
'I found this book amazing' Daniel Kahneman Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and
bestselling author of Thinking Fast & Slow The entirety of the human brain's 4-billion-year
story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs starting from
the very first brains all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from
new sets of brain modifications and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual
faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book and they make up our
itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to
breakthroughs in AI. Indeed there will be plenty of such surprises along the way. For
instance: the innovation that enabled AI to beat humans in the game of Go - temporal difference
reinforcement learning - was an innovation discovered by our fish ancestors over 500 million
years ago. The solutions to many of the current mysteries in AI - such as 'common sense' - can
be found in the tiny brain of a mouse. Where do emotions come from? Research suggests that they
may have arisen simply as a solution to navigation in ancient worm brains. Unravelling this
evolutionary story will reveal the hidden features of human intelligence and with them just
how your mind came to be.
