Max Bennett has been working in AI for consumer markets, and this book is an ambitious overview that might better be titled 'Breakthroughs in Human Brain Development'.
His history is organized by five evolutionary brain 'breakthroughs' that created/supported new behaviors and capabilities in the development chain along the way toward Homo Sapiens. In brief these are: steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing and speaking. In part he uses this framework to discuss how AI techniques have attempted to create similar capabilities and solve similar problems. For instance in the reinforcing section (esssentially about learning) there are challenges: how does the organism manage to learn something new without losing the last thing it learned, and how to learn when the outcome of an action does not have an immediate result - i.e. overcoming temporal delays.
In the speaking section, he indicates that recent findings indicate not so much that humans have new neocortex areas that support language and speaking, but that somehow we developed base instinctual behaviors that support learning language - proto-conversations with babies, and joint attention - and the other primates don't have these instincts. He describes this capability as the original singularity, since it allows for the growth of knowledge over time that just builds and builds. He thinks that modern man does not have any actual brain capabilities that weren't available tens of thousands of years ago, but we do have the accumulation of knowledge of many generations.
Note that this book does not use the word 'consciousness' at all (as far as I noticed), and the word 'mind' is used sparingly, mostly in the term 'theory of mind' (covered in the mentalizing section). One paragraph stood out to me in particular that indicates a pretty reductionist attitude - this is from page 301:
When we talk of these inner simulations, especially in the context of humans, we tend to imbue them with words like concepts, ideas, thoughts. But all these things are nothing more than renderings in the mammalian neocortical simulation. When you "think" about a past or future event, when you ponder the "concept" of a bird, when you have an "idea" as to how to make a new tool, you are merely exploring the rich three-dimensional simulated world constructed by your neocortex. It is no different, in principle, than a mouse considering which direction to turn in a maze.
While in some sense I agree that these processes are indeed the workings of the brain, I think there's a lot more to be explored here than Bennett describes. Still, I felt this was a worthwhile and interesting book, and I'd like to think about it more in comparison with Kevin Mitchell's 'Free Agents' which covers a similar evolutionary path and history.
More on A Brief History of Intelligence.
