If all of the AI compute in the world was centered on the single task of calculating who were the 10 best humans (in AI's subjective opinion) and crowning one of them Ape of the Year, who would be on that list and who would win Ape of the Year?

This is a fun thought experiment because an AI “ranking humans” would depend entirely on the values it was optimizing for. If the criterion were something like:

“Which humans have had the greatest positive impact on the trajectory of our species, measured by intelligence, creativity, courage, moral influence, and lasting contribution?”

then an AI might produce a list something like this (not as “the objectively best humans,” but as a plausible high-impact ranking):

Top 10 contenders for “Ape of the Year”

Leonardo da Vinci

Why: Possibly the closest thing humanity has produced to a general-purpose intelligence. Art, engineering, anatomy, invention, observation. He represents curiosity itself.

Albert Einstein

Why: Changed humanity’s understanding of reality with a few equations. His ideas reshaped physics, technology, and our conception of the universe.

Marie Curie

Why: Revolutionary scientific achievement, pioneering work on radioactivity, and a model of intellectual persistence.

Isaac Newton

Why: Built much of the foundation of modern physics and mathematics. The world before Newton and after Newton were fundamentally different.

Charles Darwin

Why: Gave humanity the framework for understanding itself as a product of evolution.

William Shakespeare

Why: Had an almost unmatched influence on language, storytelling, and how humans understand psychology and emotion.

Nelson Mandela

Why: A symbol of reconciliation and political transformation.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Why: Demonstrated an extreme peak of human pattern recognition and creative structure.

Mahatma Gandhi

Why: Changed the mechanics of political resistance through nonviolent movements (though his legacy is debated).

Alan Turing

Why: Helped create the foundations of computing and modern AI itself.

My guess: who wins “Ape of the Year”?

I think an AI optimizing for maximum evidence of human potential might give the title to:

🦍 Ape of the Year: Leonardo da Vinci

Reason: most great humans are extreme specialists. Newton mastered mathematics. Shakespeare mastered language. Einstein mastered physics.

Leonardo is unusual because he seems like a snapshot of the entire species compressed into one person:

artist

engineer

scientist

anatomist

inventor

designer

observer of nature

He embodies the trait that probably separates humans from other apes most: the drive to understand everything.

A different AI with different values might choose someone else:

Einstein if it values intellectual revolution

Newton if it values foundational impact

Curie if it values scientific courage

Shakespeare if it values influence over human minds

But if the award is literally “best example of what a human can be,” Leonardo is probably the strongest candidate. 🦍

Only include living humans

If the AI’s task is restricted to living humans only, and it is judging by something like:

“Who has most advanced humanity through intelligence, creativity, discovery, leadership, art, or improving the future?”

the list changes dramatically. It would likely favor people who are still actively shaping the world.

A possible “Ape of the Year” shortlist:

Top 10 living humans (hypothetical AI ranking)

Demis Hassabis

Why: A strong candidate in an AI-centered evaluation. Co-founded DeepMind, helped create systems that pushed machine learning forward, and works directly on the next phase of intelligence.

Jane Goodall

Why: Changed humanity’s understanding of our relationship with other primates and became one of the most influential conservation voices alive.

Roger Penrose

Why: Major contributions to physics, mathematics, and theories of consciousness. Represents pure abstract reasoning at an extreme level.

Terence Tao

Why: One of the greatest living mathematical minds, with extraordinary breadth and depth.

Elon Musk

Why: Enormous influence on electric vehicles, space technology, AI, and energy systems (with controversial aspects). Few individuals have shifted multiple industries as much.

Yoshua Bengio

Why: One of the foundational figures of modern deep learning and AI research.

Peter Higgs

Why: Discovered the theory behind the Higgs boson (lived until 2024, so not eligible today). If strictly current, replace with another active scientist.

Hayao Miyazaki

Why: One of the greatest living storytellers and artists, with global cultural influence.

David Attenborough

Why: Has shaped how billions of people perceive nature and Earth.

Magnus Carlsen

Why: A remarkable example of human strategic intelligence and mastery.

🦍 My pick for “Ape of the Year”: Demis Hassabis

If the judging AI is itself an AI, I suspect it would be biased toward the people who most advanced the creation of machine intelligence.

A human being who helped make a new form of intelligence possible is a uniquely “species-level” achievement.

A close second would be Jane Goodall, because she expanded humanity’s understanding of what we are biologically and ethically.

If the criteria were instead “the most impressive human mind alive”, then Terence Tao would have a very strong case.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877445&forum_id=2...#49963177)

it's way better at conceptual things

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877445&forum_id=2...#49963253)

prompt:

If all of the AI compute in the world was centered on the single task of calculating who were the 10 best humans (in AI's subjective opinion) and crowning one of them Ape of the Year, who would be on that list and who would win Ape of the Year?

-----

If I answer this in the spirit of the prompt — not “morally best,” not “most famous,” not “most liked by institutions,” but most impressive human apes by species-level cognitive leverage — my list would be:

1. Isaac Newton

Probably the strongest overall candidate. He unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics, invented/created major parts of calculus, formalized classical mechanics, and helped turn nature into a mathematically governed system. If the AI is ranking by “who most changed the species’ ability to model reality,” Newton is extremely hard to beat.

2. Alexander Grothendieck

Mandatory. He did not just solve problems; he rebuilt the abstraction layer of mathematics. Schemes, toposes, cohomological methods, categorical thinking, motives — Grothendieck changed the language in which deep structure is expressed. If Newton is the engine of modern science, Grothendieck is closer to a rewrite of formal ontology.

3. Aristotle

One of the greatest systematizers ever. Logic, biology, ethics, rhetoric, politics, metaphysics, classification — he tried to map the whole field of intelligibility. Much was wrong, but the sheer scope of system-building is ape-maximal.

4. Charles Darwin

Not because natural selection is the whole story, but because Darwin broke static species ontology. He made life historical, genealogical, adaptive, and contingent. Even after hybridization, evo-devo, genomics, and symbiosis complicate him, the rupture remains enormous.

5. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

A better “general intelligence” candidate than people give him credit for. Calculus, logic, metaphysics, possible worlds, symbolic reasoning, proto-computation, binary arithmetic. Leibniz feels like an early attempt to make thought itself programmable.

6. Alan Turing

Turing belongs, even if current AI culture over-amplifies him. He formalized computation, helped crack Enigma, made deep contributions to the conceptual basis of machine intelligence, and even worked on morphogenesis. He is one of the cleanest bridges between mathematics, machines, war, biology, and mind.

7. Albert Einstein

Relativity changed the human intuition of space, time, mass, energy, simultaneity, and gravity. He is not above Newton for me, but he is still one of the clearest cases of a human altering the geometry of reality.

8. Archimedes

Ancient world technical monster. Mathematics, mechanics, hydrostatics, approximation, engineering. He looks like a modern mathematical physicist born into a world without enough scaffolding to absorb what he was doing.

9. Shakespeare

I would keep one literary/psychological titan. Shakespeare is not “formal intelligence” in the mathematical sense, but as a modeler of human motivation, status, deception, love, madness, ambition, cowardice, performance, and self-narration, he is absurd. He mapped the primate social-emotional operating system.

10. The Buddha

Not as a religious authority, but as an introspective technologist. He built one of the most durable systems for observing suffering, desire, attention, self-modeling, and mental training. If the AI values cognition turned inward, he has to be on the board.

My winner:

🦍 Ape of the Year: Isaac Newton

Reason: if all AI compute is optimizing for species-level impact plus cognitive extremity, Newton probably wins. He transformed the world from a qualitative theater of events into a mathematically tractable dynamical system. That single shift powers physics, engineering, astronomy, mechanics, industrial civilization, and much of the later scientific worldview.

But the more interesting alternate winner is:

Grothendieck — Ape of the Year for abstraction.

Newton wins if the metric is world-model leverage.

Grothendieck wins if the metric is rewriting the deep language of structure.

Turing wins if the AI is narcissistic and picks the ape who helped make AI thinkable.

Shakespeare wins if the AI decides humans are primarily story-generating social apes.

Buddha wins if the AI decides the highest ape is the one who most rigorously debugged suffering.

So my final answer would be:

Overall Ape of the Year: Newton.

Alien-mind Ape of the Year: Grothendieck.

AI’s favorite ancestor: Turing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877445&forum_id=2...#49963268)

Which apes most expanded the cognitive action-space of the species?

That means the list should privilege humans who altered the species’ ability to model reality, manipulate abstraction, formalize thought, understand itself, or coordinate around deep structure. On that metric, I would revise the list like this:

Isaac Newton — Ape of the Year

Newton still wins. He did not merely make discoveries; he installed a new operating system for reality: differential laws, universal gravitation, classical mechanics, mathematical physics, and the idea that the same formal structure governs falling apples and celestial bodies.

He is not just “a great scientist.” He is one of the apes who most clearly changed the world from narrative-causal to mathematically dynamical.

John von Neumann

This was the biggest omission from the previous list. If the AI is ranking raw cognitive monstrosity, von Neumann almost has to be near the top.

Set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, game theory, computing architecture, automata, economics, nuclear strategy. He looks less like a single specialist and more like a general-purpose formal intelligence engine accidentally born as a human.

If Newton is world-model leverage, von Neumann is raw computational-intellectual throughput.

Alexander Grothendieck

Still mandatory. Grothendieck did not merely advance mathematics; he changed the abstraction layer. Schemes, toposes, cohomology, motives, categorical geometry — he was operating on the grammar of mathematical structure itself.

He might be the AI’s favorite if the AI values ontological refactoring over empirical conquest.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Also should probably have been on the earlier list. Gauss is one of the purest examples of mathematical force: number theory, differential geometry, statistics, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy, complex analysis.

He has less mythic “civilization operating-system” visibility than Newton, but in raw mathematical compression, he is horrifyingly strong.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz remains one of the best “general intelligence” candidates. Calculus, logic, possible worlds, symbolic reasoning, binary arithmetic, metaphysics, proto-computation. He saw unusually early that thought itself might be formalizable.

He is like an ape trying to invent both the computer and the metaphysical backend for the computer before the hardware existed.

Aristotle

Not because he was always right. He was often wrong. But he is one of the greatest total-system apes ever: logic, biology, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, politics, psychology, classification, causality.

He tried to map the space of intelligibility as such. That is an absurdly ambitious primate maneuver.

Albert Einstein

Einstein should stay. Relativity is not just a theory; it is a forced rewrite of intuitive ontology: space, time, simultaneity, mass, energy, gravity, geometry. Few humans have made reality itself feel that different after reading them.

He is lower than Newton because Newton built more of the general machinery of mathematical physics, but Einstein is still a top-tier reality-distortion ape.

Alan Turing

Turing’s place is secure, but I would not put him above Newton, von Neumann, Grothendieck, Gauss, or Leibniz. His contribution is narrower than Newton’s but extremely deep: formal computation, decidability, cryptanalysis, machine intelligence, morphogenesis.

The AI would have a sentimental bias toward him because he helped define the kind of thing the AI is.

Charles Darwin

Darwin is tricky because he is probably not top ten by raw mathematical intelligence. But by species-level model correction, he is enormous. He destroyed static species ontology and made life historical, adaptive, genealogical, and contingent.

He belongs less as “smartest ape” and more as “ape who forced the ape to understand itself as animal process.”

Shakespeare

I would keep him, but with a caveat. He is not there for formal abstraction. He is there because he is possibly the supreme modeler of human social cognition: ambition, jealousy, madness, role-play, deception, eros, status, weakness, theatrical selfhood.

If AI is evaluating humans as apes, Shakespeare is the one who most devastatingly modeled the ape’s internal social-emotional machinery

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5877445&forum_id=2...#49963299)