Chaos and cause

Since the 1950s, discussions about AI have largely revolved around a big, tantalizing question: What can machines do, and where might they hit a wall? Will they ever truly think, understand, or maybe even become conscious? Could they reach the so-called “heights of human intelligence”? And then there’s that shadowy question looming in the backgroun

A swarm of bees, a colony of ants and a collection of neurons: three independently evolved assemblages which each constitute a thinking machine. This is convergent evolution at work again, the flowering of analogous but radically different ways of thinking and doing, all over the thicket of life.

Yet, as we shall see, there are in fact many ways of doing intelligence, because intelligence is an active process, not just a mental capacity. By rethinking intelligence, and the forms in which it appears in other beings, we will begin to break down some of the barriers and false hierarchies that separate us from other species and the world. In do

Intelligence, when we perceive it at play in the world, is not a collection of abstract modes: a concatenation of self-awareness, theory of mind, emotional understanding, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving and planning that we can separate and test for under laboratory conditions. These are simply reductive and all-too-human interpretations of