I’ve just started reading A Brief History of Intelligence, and I thought I’d share why this book instantly pulled me in.
As a psychiatry resident, I spend my days trying to understand how people think, feel, cope, spiral, and recover. And somewhere between treating minds and tinkering with technology after hours, I’ve always wondered—how did intelligence evolve in the first place? And if we ever manage to replicate it in machines, what would that even mean?
That’s exactly what Max Bennett dives into. The book begins by tracing how our brain developed step by step through evolution—not like a perfectly engineered system, but more like something that kept getting patched over millions of years for survival. I find that oddly comforting. Our minds aren’t perfect; they’re just incredibly adaptive.
What excites me most is this idea: to build truly intelligent AI, maybe we first need to understand how natural intelligence came to be. Layers of cognition, from basic instincts to complex reasoning—much like layers of code, but messier, emotional, beautifully human.
I’ll keep updating this space as I go through the book—maybe with reflections, maybe with arguments against the author, maybe with random thoughts triggered at 2 AM after a long shift.
Let’s see where this journey goes. For now, I’m just curious—and that feels like the best possible place to start.