Question: What is the most interesting thing you have ever found out?

Conor McGinn answered on 29 Feb 2016:

Hey Orla,
Asking an engineer that question i’s like asking a musician whats their favourite song! We usually hear alot of interesting things! 😀 The first thing that springs to mind is something called the ‘Social Intelligence Hypothesis’.
A small bit of background before I explain it… Evolution works on a basic principle; animals/plants that have good genetics are more likely to survive and live to reproduce than animals that do not. So over time (typically tens of thousands of years) an animal will evolve becoming ever better at surviving than its ancestors were.
Humans, like every animal, evolved this way. However we are very different – our brains are much bigger and more developed than other animals. Popular opinion is that to survive in the wild, humans needed to evolve like this. Humans evolved big brains so that they could make tools, light fires, develop hunting weapons etc.
The social intelligence hypothesis challenges this in a major way. It says that humans evolved such massive brains because our social societies became so complex, that to survive we needed to be able to do things such as read people body language, predict behavior, manipulate people etc. All of this takes a truly massive amount of brain power. Think about how you can tell if someone is mad at you from a glance – in such a small action, our brains can refine and retract so much information! And being able to pick up these signals must have been so important for survival. It follows then that the ability to make tools, make fires etc. happened only as byproduct of needing a bigger brain for social interaction. If the social intelligence hypothesis is true (we dont know for sure if it is), then the implications for artificial intelligence are really profound; the hardest problem is not likely to make a robot perform a task, but getting it to socially interact with a people.