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Thoughts on Thought

We’re as Smart as the Universe Gets

James Miles argues, among other things, that E.T. will be like Kim Kardashian, and that the real threat of advanced AI has been misunderstood.

In 1995 the English mathematical biologist John Maynard Smith published The Major Transitions in Evolution. Maynard Smith was a co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology in the 1960s and the founder of evolutionary game theory in the early 1970s, and what this book was quietly saying about high intelligence can be considered revolutionary, or at least, notably evolutionary. As a result of a paper I wrote about evolution in the journal Philosophy in 1998, I ended up friends for the last decade of his life with the other co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology, the American biologist George C. Williams. And like Maynard Smith and the early Darwinians (including Darwin), Williams was fascinated by the so-called ‘high intelligence paradox’ and the evolutionary problems it implies.

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