Recapitulation of Intelligence

Haeckel's biogenetic law—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—proposed that the development of an individual organism tends to retrace in compressed form the evolutionary history of its lineage. The strong version was an overstatement; the weak version, that development builds later capacities on earlier ones in a sequence that mirrors evolutionary history, has been confirmed even in digital organisms by Avida platform research. The recapitulation of intelligence applies this framework to AI development: AI appears to have recapitulated, in dramatically compressed form, the cognitive evolutionary sequence that biology took hundreds of millions of years to produce. Early AI systems—the perceptrons of the 1950s—performed simple pattern recognition, the cognitive capacity of organisms with rudimentary nervous systems. The next generation developed more sophisticated perception, corresponding to the capabilities of vertebrates with well-developed sensory cortices. Language models introduced the processing of symbolic information, corresponding roughly to the cognitive capabilities of social primates. Current frontier models exhibit something approaching creative synthesis, the capacity that characterizes