New Book Traces The Biology Behind AI

Bob Burgin releases “Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology” with Forbes Books. ISBN-13: 979-8901800317

FORBES BOOKS

NEW YORK (September 8, 2026)—Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology by Bob Burgin is now available on Amazon and at major booksellers. The book is published with Forbes Books, the exclusive business book publishing imprint of Forbes.

Most explanations of artificial intelligence begin with the machine: the models, the data, the compute. Bob Burgin begins somewhere else. The human brain runs on roughly twenty watts, about the draw of a dim light bulb, and from that small allowance it learns, predicts, adapts, and creates. Then humans borrowed the principles that emerged from constraint and built them into machines plugged into the power grid. Emergence is about what happens to intelligence when you remove that constraint.

Drawing on neuroscience, memory research, consciousness studies, and machine learning, the book’s journey spans Nobel Prize-winning research on sea slug neurons, AlphaGo’s unexpected strategies, the case of a man who spent decades unable to form new memories, and extended dialogues Burgin conducted with today’s AI systems about whether machines could have something like consciousness. Throughout, he examines the roles of memory, emotion, embodiment, and constraint in how intelligence arises.

“The protein folding problem sat unsolved for fifty years, and it wasn’t cracked by a biologist alone,” Burgin said. “It was cracked in partnership with a neural network built on principles we borrowed from our own brains. Three million researchers in more than a hundred and ninety countries now use the result, and drug discovery and precision cancer treatment are next on that list.”

“I use the term ‘emergence’ in the sense that complexity gives rise to surprising behavior that, while not obvious from the parts alone, can still be explained in terms of them,” he added. “It is how complexity becomes cognition, how neurons become thought, how code becomes conversation.”

Emergence presents AI as an extension of a much older story about how learning systems develop. Burgin invites readers to reconsider what intelligence is, where it comes from, and what its movement beyond biological limits could mean for the future.

This release is posted on behalf of Forbes Books (operated by Advantage Media Group under license).