A Brief History of Intelligence

Bennett, a tech entrepreneur rather than an academic neuroscientist, organizes half a billion years of brain evolution around five breakthroughs, from simple approach/avoid steering in early animals up through human language, and uses each as a lens on what current AI systems can and can't yet do. Reviewers have noted the book is more persuasive where the neuroscience is well-established, like reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia, and more speculative where it reaches for contested territory like theory of mind and attention routing. The ambition to connect evolutionary biology directly to AI architecture is what makes the book distinctive, and also where it asks readers to accept more inference than the earlier, better-evidenced chapters do.