Why Bigger AI is a Trap

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Your brain is shrinking. It has been for 3,000 years. And evolution doesn't care. In this episode, we explore one of biology's most uncomfortable truths: intelligence is not a goal. It is a cost. The human brain burns 20% of the body's energy at 2% of its mass, and evolution has been quietly trimming the excess ever since we started writing things down. Every domesticated species on Earth shows the same pattern. Stabilise the environment, externalise the cognition, and the expensive tissue gets cut. Now ask yourself what AI is doing to that equation. We unpack the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, the Holocene brain reduction, and why the entire AI scaling paradigm is repeating a mistake that biology solved hundreds of millions of years ago. The future of intelligent systems is not bigger models. It is leaner architectures that do more with less, the same strategy that kept biological brains viable for three billion years. If nature's answer to the intelligence problem is "just enough, no more," maybe ours should be too.

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