What Have We Done? From Natural Selection to Artificial Intelligence

Another evolutionary Big-History-in-a-Nutshell by Daniel Dennett, from Natural Selection to Artificial Intelligence, from the last chapter of his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back ("The Age of Post-Intelligent Design"):

I have argued that the basic, bottom-up, clueless R&D [Research and Design] done by natural selection has gradually created cranes—labor-saving products that make design work more effective—which have opened up Design Space for further cranes, in an accelerating zoom into the age of intelligent design, where top-down, reflective, reason-formulating, systematic, foresighted R&D can flourish. This process has succeeded in changing the balance of selective forces that shape us and all other organisms and in creating highly predictive theories that retrospectively explain the very processes of their creation. This cascade of cranes is not a miracle, not a gift from God, but a natural product of the fundamental evolutionary process, along with the other fruits of the Tree of Life.

To review, over several thousand years we human beings have come to appreciate the powers of individual minds. Building on the instinctive habits of all living things, we distinguish food from poison, and, like other locomoting organisms, we are textra sensitive to animacy (guided movement) in other moving things, and more particularly to the beliefs and desires (information and goals) that guide those movements, tracking as best we can who knows what and who wants what, in order to guide our own efforts at hide and seek. This native bias is the genetic basis for the intentional stance, our practice of treating each other as rational agents guided by largely true beliefs and largely well-ordered desires. Our uninterrumpted interest in these issues has generated the folk psychology that we rely on to make sense of one another. We use it to predicet and explain not just the repetitive behaviors we observe in our neighbors and ourselves, and the "forced moves" that anyone would be stupid not to execute, but even many of the strokes of "insight" that are the mark of "genius."  That is, our expectations are very frequently confirmed, which cements our allegiance to the intentional stance, and when our expectations are confounded, we tend to fall back on "explanations" of our failure that are at best inspired guesswork and at worst misleading mythmaking

We encourage our children to be curious and creative, and we self-consciously identify the ruts and boundaries in our own thinking processes so that we can try to overcome them. The minds we prize most are the minds that are neither too predictable (boring, unchallenging) nor too chaotic. Practice makes perfect, and we have invented games that encourage us to rehearse our mind-moves, such as chess and Go and poker, as well as prosthetic devices—telescopes, maps, calculators, clocks, and thousands of others—that permit us to apply our mind-moves in ever more artificial and sophisticated environments. In every sphere of inquiry and design, we have highly organized populations of experts collaborating to create and perfect theories and other artifacts, and we have adopted traditions and market mechanisms to provide the time, energy, and materials for these projects. We are the intelligent designers living in a world intelligently designed for intelligent designers by our ancestors. And now, after centuries of dreaming about this prospect, we have begun designing and producing artifacts that can design and produce artifacts (that can design and produce artifacts...).