The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the universe – and that complexity may be due to a surge of hormones released by the placenta during pregnancy. While numerous ideas have been proposed to explain human brain evolution, it remains one of our greatest scientific mysteries. One explanation, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that our large brains evolved to manage complex social relationships. It posits that navigating large group dynamics requires a certain degree of cognitive ability, pushing social species to develop bigger brains. For instance, other highly sociable animals, such as dolphins and elephants, have relatively large brains too.

MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: AI is not about trying to create life, right? But it's kind of, very much feels like that. I mean, if we ever achieved the ultimate dream of AI, which I call the "Hollywood dream of AI," the kind of thing that we see in Hollywood movies, then we will have created machines that are conscious, potentially, in the same way that human beings are. So it's very like that kind of dream of creating life- and that, in itself, is a very old dream. It goes back to the ancient Greeks: The Greeks had myths about the blacksmiths to the gods who could create life from metal creatures.

I am writing this post to organize and share my thoughts about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence over the last years and especially the last few months (link to a lot of my prior writing). First, I want to come right out and say that anyone still dismissing what we are now seeing as a "parlor trick" or a "statistical parrot" is engaging in the most epic goal post moving ever. We are not talking a few extra yards here, the goal posts are not in the stadium anymore, they are in a far away city. Growing up I was extremely fortunate that my parents supported my interest in computers by buying an Apple II for me and that a local computer science student took me under his wing. Through him I found two early AI books: one in German by Stoyan and Goerz (I don't recall the title) and Winston and Horn's "Artifical Intelligence." I still have both of these although locating them among the thousand or more books in our home will require a lot of time or hopefully soon a highly intelligent robot (ideally running the VIAM operating system – shameless plug for a USV portfolio company).

Jeff Bezos has his left foot propped up on a fire pit, his face illuminated by the flames. A drink in his hand, he's feeling relaxed, often bursting out in that signature bellow of a laugh. Joining Bezos at the firepit that night and over the course of three days at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs, California are about 200 of the world's smartest and most accomplished people–among them: two astronauts, at least one Nobel Prize winner, the former head of DARPA, NASA's former number two, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich ("BK," he's called here), MythBuster Adam Savage, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and so on. With cigars and whiskey in their hands, these global power players are talking earnestly about Big Issues: gravitational waves, ground-breaking tools for helping the deaf perceive the world in new ways, cutting-edge robot grasping technology, hyper-efficient 3D-printed rocket engines, and AI, always AI. Welcome to Amazon's MARS Conference–or, as Bezos calls it, "Summer camp for geeks." Amazon's has numerous reasons for hosting the event.

Any denizen of these digital days can't help but feel surrounded by awesomely intelligent devices that seemingly know and control all. From artificially intelligently enabled mattresses that understand your sleep patterns better than you, to adaptively learning apps that anticipate your never-varying morning beverage order. When did this explosion of computer intelligence occur, and, really, how much easier is your life as a result? To be sure, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have made, and continue to make enormous strides with an accelerating pace. Any industry or business that is not developing and embracing these technologies will certainly perish.

The Turing award, in existence since 1966, comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel. Last year's award went to Leslie Valiant, a Harvard University computer scientist. One past winner, Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, says Pearl's accomplishments have "redefined the term'thinking machine'" over the past 30 years. Pearl's efforts have had "a pervasive influence not only on machine learning but on natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, econometrics, cognitive science and statistics," Cerf said in a statement. The UCLA computer science professor is widely credited with coining the term "Bayesian Network," which refers to a statistical model ACM describes as mimicking "the neural activities of the human brain, constantly exchanging messages without benefit of a supervisor."

A bit of healthy competition is often regarded as a good way of helping people improve their performance. But it seems we may owe our big brains to our tendency to size each other up too. A team of scientists have found that judging other people's standing in a group appears to have played a key role in the evolution of human brain size over the past two million years. Making judgement about other people is a complex task that requires us to made decisions using a range of information. This'sizing up' process (stock picture) can help us decide whether to cooperate with others and played a key role in the evolution of our brains According to the team, the research could also have future implications in developing intelligent and autonomous machines.