For many scientists since Descartes the evolution of mankind from being just another animal to that unique rational species that it has become has first and foremost to do with the evolution of the brain. So it's all about the hardware, our physiology, our inner workings. This approach can also be described as inside-out. First we are what we are as rational animals. Inside. Our brain allows us to invent, to be creative and to develop tools to help us. We invent language as such a tool and finally we've become those social animals that so many scientists think of when speaking of the human race. That's the outside.

But even in or especially in science there are alternative approaches and models as well. One of these alternative models comes from the philosopher Philip Pettit. Philip Pettit is both professor at Princeton University as well as professor at Australian National University, so he's a well traveled international scientist full of ideas that sometimes challenge the way we see human evolution.

For Philip Pettit the evolution of mankind follows a completely different path, for him it's more of an outside-in approach. First comes the outside, our social environments, our peers, our group, we are social animals first. And because something like language has developed, because of such a social environment our brain started to become bigger, it transformed and in the end we've developed our rational mind, our critical thinking and those inner monologues exactly because of such circumstances. So our inside, our brain, the advent of language, is just a consequence of what has happened outside first.

Especially today in an environment where AI is starting to become a major topic in almost every discipline and every discussion the key role of language is at least interesting to consider. What if Philip Pettit is right and indeed language plays such an important part in the cognitive evolution of what we call rational animals? Is it possible that the same forces that shaped us, our brains, our human behaviour, our critical thinking are also critical for the development of AI?

All the major flavors of AI today, Gemini from Google, Claude by Anthropic or ChatGPT by OpenAI, only to name a few, have one thing in common. They are all LLMs, large language models. They eat and digest and recompile language in all sorts of forms. Our collective knowledge presented to them as language builds up the core foundation of all these AI models. After a lot of black box processing and quite a significant consumption of power they put out really remarkable and always very articulate answers to literally all questions we might have or can think of. They are language machines, language is their core business and even today at this still rather early stage of development they are shockingly good at it.

So coming back to Philip Pettit and his outside-in approach. What if outside really comes first, if language comes first? And what if it does not only come first but is crucial for the whole development of a species. What does it mean when machines that are technologically very different from our biological systems but that are fed and have grown up with the same source material and in a similar environment that we as human beings have? All of this in only a much more compressed and condensed way? They learn in months what we need decades for. Are these AI models really the beginning of artificial intelligences that speak, think, maybe even feel like us? Is this the beginning of real AGI, of artificial general intelligence, of machines that are at least as good as human beings in almost any task we can throw at them. Are we about to create a new species? A species whose development is based on the same principles as our very own development, is based on language?

If all of this is true and LLMs and their heavy reliance on language continues to be as promising as it seems to be today, we really live in exciting times. The future has barely begun but it seems the catching farewell phrase from the Star Trek universe all of a sudden has gotten a much broader meaning. Live long and prosper, Alexa! Live long and prosper, Siri!

Just recently Philip Pettit was an interesting guest in the always very informative "Mindscape Podcast", episode 322 by Sean Carroll. For further reading Philip Pettit has just published his new book "When Minds Converse: A Social Genealogy of the Human Soul" on the very same topics discussed here.