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Robonaissance

An Unfinished History of Intelligence

An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 7: The Next Chapter
Every earlier part closed by naming what the new mind could not yet do. This one cannot, because the story is not finished. We are inside the chapter…
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 6: The Mind That Models Minds
A corridor does not know it is being simulated. A rival does. The hardest thing a mind ever learned to model was another mind, one modelling it back…
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 5: The Words That Escaped the Skull
For four billion years, everything a mind learned died with it. Then words opened a channel between heads, and the ceiling on intelligence stopped being…
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 4: The Inner World
A bacterium pays for every mistake with its body. Imagination is the invention that made mistakes free. A rat has one, and you can watch it work.
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 3: The Rewiring Brain
A reflex is a model written by evolution. Brilliant, and permanently out of date. The synapse is the invention that let a mind be rewritten inside a…
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 2: The Invention of the Neuron
A chemical signal crosses a bacterium in a hundredth of a second. To cross a single centimeter, it would need the better part of two weeks. Nothing…
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 1: Chemical Intelligence
No neurons. No brain. A memory two seconds long. And a complete learning loop, running on protein, four billion years before anyone wrote it down.
 • Hugo
An Unfinished History of Intelligence, Part 0: The Thread
A bacterium solved the problem first. Four billion years later, a machine solved it again. Same problem. Still open.
 • Hugo
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