Has Humanity Reached Peak Intelligence? BBC

Are our IQs set to increase forever, or are we on the cusp of decline? David Robson explores the past, present and future of intelligence (BBC).


It's definitely downhill from now on - at least for some of us (and perhaps our politicians).


Alison Gopnik - A Separate Kind of Intelligence, EdgeCast (listen)

"It looks as if there’s a general relationship between the very fact of childhood and the fact of intelligence. That might be informative if one of the things that we’re trying to do is create artificial intelligences or understand artificial intelligences. In neuroscience, you see this pattern of development where you start out with this very plastic system with lots of local connection, and then you have a tipping point where that turns into a system that has fewer connections but much stronger, more long-distance connections. It isn’t just a continuous process of development. So, you start out with a system that’s very plastic but not very efficient, and that turns into a system that’s very efficient and not very plastic and flexible".