Rober Sapolsky

John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University.

Introduction

It may not be immediately obvious why a technologist, software engineer or systems architect would be interested in a book, written by a professor of biology.  I had been in conversation with a number of very bright people who are convinced that the advent of Artificial General Intelligence is the same thing as arriving at human intelligence or consciousness.  I found it very hard to see how or why a machine would go through the turmoil of my own first person experience in order to solve a problem.  For good and bad, human beings have been equipped with this set of capabilities, layer on layer of adaptation and reuse, some electrical, some chemical some cultural.  Sapolsky spends the first part of the book explaining the causes and mechanisms that drive our behavior.  He spends the second half looking at examples of the best and worst of human behaviour and and how the mechanisms examined in the first half drive those behaviours.  

The sense you get is that the human first person experience is created by a lot of things that happened to be hanging around in the reptile brain, or the early mammalian brain, or the mollusk nervous system.   Our understanding of each other is mostly driven from the need to cooperate with the 50 people in our tribe.  The stories that we tell ourselves as to why we are doing something are constructed from influences both internal (biological) and external (cultural).

The collection of AI Agents that are being created in the current wave of technological advancement might mirror the complexity of biological and cultural evolution, but share nothing of its architecture.  It seems infinitely unlikely that AI will think like us.  

However, it is very likely that the set of AI Agents will contribute to external influences on our own thinking and therefore behaviour in ways that are very hard to predict