A series of landmark events helped cement Bennet’s love of Chicago, and today he’s counts the White Sox and Pequod’s pizza among his favorite things. Thanks in part to a Bennett family lore (his great grandfather wanted to move to Chicago, but instead settled in Liverpool), a young Roger Bennett became a die-hard Bears fan. ![]() ![]() While Bennett currently calls New York City home, his first American love is actually Chicago. There’s also a very strong Chicago connection. See the sellers listing for full details. He is the author of many books and a large number of journal articles on various aspects of marketing and business management. Bennet writes lovingly about what the United States represented to him as a young person trying to figure himself out in Northern England. A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Roger’s current research interests involve the accessibility of really new technologies (driverless cars, pilotless aircraft, smart cities) to people with physical or intellectual impairments. But soccer only plays a small part in Bennett’s memoir, the book offers a funny, heartwarming portrait of an English lad who grew up loving American films, music, sports and optimism. The Liverpool native is known to millions of soccer fans as one of the co-hosts of the popular podcast and now TV show, MEN IN BLAZERS. Evolution gave us our magnificent human brain, he writes, and now that we are in a position to play god and create a new form of intelligence, we must first decide on our goal - are we destined to spread out across the cosmos? Or will we fail, victims of pride or climate change or something yet unseen, just another branch on the evolutionary tree, which will grow on without humans and perhaps never add a limb called “Artificial Intelligence?” No reader alive today will live long enough for that answer, but Bennett makes a solid case for why reverse engineering the human brain may lead to future breakthroughs in the science of AI.After reading Roger Bennett’s wonderful new memoir, (RE)BORN IN THE USA: AN ENGLISHMAN’S LOVE LETTER TO HIS CHOSEN HOME, it’s hard to imagine anyone loving American pop culture more than the celebrated soccer commentator, podcaster and broadcaster. “They learn things all at once and then stop learning.” We’ve trained ChatGPT using the entire contents of the Internet, but the software can’t learn new things because of the risk that it will forget old things, or learn the wrong things.īennett is intelligent enough not to draw any conclusions about AI in a field that is changing daily, but he does end his book with a challenge. Why can’t machines truly learn? Even ChatGPT, which every industry seems to be embracing these days, can’t “learn things sequentially,” writes Bennett. When Bennett begins to connect the evolution of the human brain to where we are in the development of artificial intelligence is when the book, for this reader, gets more interesting. The sensible, slow, and small creatures of the Ediacaran would have been replaced by a bustling zoo of large mobile animals as varied in form as in size.” But to his credit, he begins each new chapter with actual prose, as in this description of the Cambrian explosion more than 500 million years ago: “The gooey microbial mats of the Ediacaran that turned the ocean floor green would have long since faded and given way to a more familiar sandy underbelly. ![]() It can feel like you’re reading a textbook at times. Bennett cites the work of psychologists and neuroscientists every step of the way and includes plenty of charts and graphs to make his points. ![]() The first half of the book is a touch dry, detailing not only what caused worms to turn (food!), but how fish learn via trial and error and the pivotal role the basal ganglia plays in dictating behavior, among many, many other evolutionary developments. So he begins with those nematodes - worms, to you and me - and painstakingly details the five breakthroughs that over the course of billions of years evolved into the three-pound brain that is folded into all of our skulls. Ever wonder how Homo sapiens got so smart? How come we developed actual language when all the other animals didn’t? How about what first made a nematode turn its body in a different direction? Or… what’s a nematode?Īnswers to those questions and much, much more can be found in the pages of Max Bennett’s new book “A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI and the Five Breakthroughs that Made Our Brains.” At 365 pages plus 45 more with a glossary, chapter notes and a bibliography, readers can quibble whether it’s indeed brief, but it is certainly thorough.īennett’s premise - he’s a software entrepreneur who founded a company called Bluecore that “helped predict what consumers would buy before they knew what they wanted” - is that humans won’t ever create true artificial intelligence without understanding exactly what led to the real intelligence we already possess.
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