Those are also the processes by which all new knowledge is created: They are how we innovate, make progress, and create abstract understanding for its own sake. This is human-level intelligence: thinking. It is also, or should be, the property we seek in artificial general intelligence (AGI). Here I'll reserve the term “thinking” for processes that can create understanding (explanatory knowledge). Popper’s argument implies that all thinking entities—human or not, biological or artificial—must create such knowledge in fundamentally the same way. Hence understanding any of those entities requires traditionally human concepts such as culture, creativity, disobedience, and morality— which justifies using the uniform term people to refer to all of them. Misconceptions about human thinking and human origins are causing corresponding misconceptions about AGI and how it might be created. For example, it is generally assumed that the evolutionary pressure that produced modern humans was provided by the benefits of having an ever greater ability to innovate. But if that were so, there would have been rapid progress as soon as thinkers existed, just as we hope will happen when we create artificial ones. If thinking had been commonly used for anything other than imitating, it would also have been used for innovation, even if only by accident, and innovation would have created opportunities for further innovation, and so on exponentially. But instead, there were hundreds of thousands of years of near stasis. Progress happened only on timescales much longer than people’s lifetimes, so in a typical generation no one benefited from any progress. Therefore, the benefits of the ability to innovate can have exerted little or no evolutionary pressure during the biological evolution of the human brain. That evolution was driven by the benefits of preserving cultural knowledge. Benefits to the genes, that is. Culture, in that era, was a very mixed blessing to individual people. Their c