I came up with a similar idea recently--it figures that every original idea I ever have turns out to be not original and decades-old. Perhaps the lack of succe

I came up with a similar idea recently--it figures that every original idea I ever have turns out to be not original and decades-old. Perhaps the lack of success so far has been due to the fact that the faculties of the brain we attribute to higher-order complex thought are themselves based upon brain regions that are much older evolutionary-speaking. So it's not just one system you have to evolve--it's many hierarchical subsystems. And given the amount of time it took before human-level intelligence arose in the animal kingdom it's pretty clear that randomly evolving a human-level intelligence isn't something that's going to happen very often. It also seems to me that the only reason intelligence evolved in the first place was because of the complex environment provided by our natural world. I have a feeling that we're not going to see much in the way of intelligent learning systems unless we can provide those systems with a sufficiently complex environment to learn and evolve within.