Hard to say if politics was the entire reason… We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn’t come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you’re thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as “wanting” or “happy”? You’re probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it were another ape. Ape behaviour is so complex that other, complex systems can fit right into that rules processing engine, but that engine leaves its fingerprints all over the results...
Which is the entire reason this website exists. If we truly had a general-purpose intelligence most of the glitches in our thinking that we have to learn to be careful of wouldn’t be there to start with.
Hard to say if politics was the entire reason… We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn’t come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you’re thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as “wanting” or “happy”? You’re probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it were another ape. Ape behaviour is so complex that other, complex systems can fit right into that rules processing engine, but that engine leaves its fingerprints all over the results...
Which is the entire reason this website exists. If we truly had a general-purpose intelligence most of the glitches in our thinking that we have to learn to be careful of wouldn’t be there to start with.