The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller
Throughout “The Mating Mind”, Geoffrey Miller offers an original insight into the evolution of the human mind. I believe that the utility of his theory is not only limited to giving us a possible explanation of the intriguing brain evolution, but it can also be a source of inspiration while designing and building intelligent machines. Since artificial intelligence aims at imitating human intelligence, knowing the circumstances and mechanisms that led to the development of the human brain should be beneficial for the development of machine intelligence.
In “The Mating Mind”, Miller suggests that “Human intelligence can be demonstrated very effectively through verbal courtship and any machine capable of verbal courtship should be considered genuinely intelligent”. I find this idea very interesting and I think that we can be inspired by our ancestors’ courtship strategies in the field of artificial intelligence. For example, an intelligent machine can be designed to try to “attract” other machines by developing more sophisticated programs and by using a language of communication. Every machine could be given the possibility to choose the machine to “mate” with i.e. to merge its program with. The criteria for mate choice can be initially given by humans and will certainly be different from humans’ criteria in sexual selection.