How did humans get so smart? A random reshuffle in our ancestor's genome more than 3 million years ago let our brains grow three times as large. David Haussler at the University of California, Santa Cruz and his colleagues were comparing brain development in humans and monkeys when they found one key difference.

Human intelligence may have first evolved to help us work together, according to a new study. Research suggests that our ape-like ancestors boosted their brain size when they began to co-operate to hunt for food and shelter. Scientists said that the expanding intelligence of our ancestors in turn helped them better co-operate and take down larger prey, such as mammoths, that they could share with a bigger group. Human intelligence may have first evolved to help us work together, according to a new study. Research suggests that our ape-like ancestors boosted their brain size when they began to co-operate to hunt for food and shelter.

Since the appearance of the first primates on earth around 55 million years ago, the brain evolution has progressed following a rather flat linear progression. Then, around 2 million years ago, while the evolutionary line leading to hominins finally became distinct and the Homo Habilis was walking its first steps, the growth rate of its cranial capacity suddenly began to increase exponentially from around 500cm3 to 1.330cm3 of the modern human brain. Along with its growth in size, brain kept increasing in the number of neurons it contained: from an estimated 40 to 50 billion neurons for Homo Habilis to the 86 billion of a modern adult human. And neurons are heavily involved in determining general information processing capacity (IPC), as reflected by general intelligence. The new'extra' portion of the brain that our ancestors gained, the neocortex, together with the high availability of neurons, is what makes us so special by giving us extraordinary cognitive abilities including feelings, language, thinking, planning, and personality.

We don't have to wait for the patient to get sick and present themselves anymore. Now, we can intervene before they end up in the ED or go to see the specialist. Illness is usually detectable to an algorithm before it is detectible to a patient. The fact that we wait long enough for someone to acknowledge that they should get some help is an artifact of the traditional notions we have about healthcare.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be among the latest buzzwords in finance, but applying it to investment decision making will disrupt the industry and benefit those investors who harness its power. If used correctly, AI can add high alpha potential within a more stable modeling framework. AI is the basis for a different quantitative investment paradigm. It is a nonlinear, high-dimensional learning approach that typically seeks to replicate human reasoning. One interpretation of this new paradigm can be thought of as learning (and learning to apply) "Graham and Dodd"–style systematic rules.

Once you're called a "genius," what's left? No, getting called a "genius" is the final accolade, the last laudatory label for anyone. At least that's how several members of Mensa, an organization of those who've scored in the 98th percentile on an IQ test, see it. "I don't look at myself as a genius," LaRae Bakerink, a business consultant and a Mensa member, said. "I think that's because I see things other people have done, things they have created, discovered, or invented, and I look at those people in awe, because that's not a capability I have."

Ed Newton-Rex, who composes for choirs, says JS Bach demonstrated how the greatest creative artists draw on a wide range of qualities. "It wasn't just his knowledge of music, although that was a big part of it," he says. "It was also his fervent religious belief and very high sense of academic rigour." Until machines can encompass these, they are not likely to compose anything rivalling the Goldberg Variations. Nevertheless, as the founder of AI music composer Jukedeck, Newton-Rex thinks computers are capable of creativity.

Over the last 30 years, the world has become increasingly computerized. We've traveled through the discovery and subsequent commercialization of the internet, the birth of and increasing ubiquity of mobile phones, the rise of virtual social platforms and services, the rise of big data, and the subsequent shift from typing to real-time video and chatbot interactions. Today, we're in the beginning of the rise of rich curated media tailored to the individual. As we navigate this new paradigm, it's more important than ever before to remember it's not just about cool technology--it's about people and communities. There is no use for technology without you and me.

There's no denying that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other life on Earth. Our modern brain is an evolutionary feat more than 520 million years in the making, and it is the key to everything that makes us human. But while human brains are extraordinary, we don't have a monopoly on intelligence. "Reserving the term'cognition' for typically human problem-solving abilities ... and dismissing simpler behavior as mechanistic, reflexive, and hard-wired does not do justice to the behavioral complexities of even the simplest of organisms," University of Gronigen psychologist Marc van Duijn and his colleagues write in a widely cited 2006 paper on cognition. You might think of tool use as an exclusively human activity, but macaques on an island off Thailand have learned to use stones as tools to shuck oysters.

The next advances in artificial intelligence will come from robotics. The current state of the art in machine learning, also called AI, includes some mind-stretching achievements, but in narrow areas. The path toward building broader human-level intelligence requires us to relax the assumptions built into existing methods. Research in robotics and physical interaction will start us in this direction. AUTHOR: Brandon Rohrer PERMISSIONS: Original video was published with the Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).