corticalisation
Specialization and generality are fundamentally at odds. A baby horse is typically walking around within an hour, but it takes human babies around a year to do the same. This is the result of the corticalization of motor control: moving motor control from primitive parts of the brain based on hard-coding (like the brainstem) to the newer cerebral cortex (which favors learning from experience). As a result, we have far greater capability to pick up new motor skills, but it comes at the cost of having the longest childhood period amongst all the animal kingdom.
Human intelligence may ultimately come from nature learning the bitter lesson: that while specialized methods can win in the short run, general methods that leverage computation through learning (our big, expensive brains) win in the long run (after our long childhood). It’s bitter for a reason: most evolutionary environments won’t allow for such a long investment period of childhood or have much incentive for general intelligence, but our evolutionary environment was special.
In the long run, specialized intelligence is vestigial.
Open Questions
- Should we optimise for late bloomers in fields for truly ground breaking theories?