From prehistoric Australopithecines to Modern Humans to theories about the future of AI. This book is dense with information. Not difficult to read but I took my time to digest it. I enjoyed very much the discussion on how humans developed social language (social interactions, tool making, hunting) and then, thanks to some mutation of gene FOXP2, developed general purpose language. Zarkadakis says that we developed General Intelligence from General language. General Intelligence gave us high level consciousness. Through history we have referred to this as soul, mind, self-awareness, subjective experience (qualia). Zarkadis discusses how through the ages philosophers, thinkers, scientists have thought about us and our intelligence. This explains why we think the way do about AI nowadays: as if AI will be like us, self-aware... However in reality this won't happen, we are subjective beings but subjectivity is not logic and therefore it cannot be coded.
... and the Moravec Paradox, Moravec says that it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance in intelligence tests but difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a 1yo when it comes to perception or mobility. In other words coding cognition is easy but coding sensing and action isn't. What this means is that it is (highly) intellectual jobs which will be taken by AI, not manual ones. Janitors from the future will be better off than lawyers.
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