[GMoromisato]

I always thought it was interesting that the human brain grew relatively quickly in evolutionary history. 3 million years ago, our ancestors had a 400 cc brain. 2.5 million years later, it was 1,400 ccs--more than 3 times larger.

That implies to me that a larger brain immediately benefited our ancestors. That is, going from 400 to 410 ccs had evolutionary advantage and so did 410 to 420, etc.

That implies that once the brain architecture was set, you could increase intelligence through scale.

I bet there are some parallels to current AI there.

[marshmellman]

This comment reminded me of "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins, which explores this. To Hawkins, the brain's relatively fast evolution implies there's a general-purpose "compute" unit that, once it evolved once, could proliferate without novel evolutionary design. He claims this unit is the brain's cortical column, and provides a lot of interesting evidence and claims that I no longer remember :)