Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson's comments on the "intelligence gap".
If bees can do this, how smart are we really? Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.
Your question is excellent but I sort of arrive at an opposite conclusion. Before I explain, I want to point out that bees and jumping spiders are exceptional as far as insect* intelligence goes.
The gist of my view is that evolution is the mother of all demo scene hackers. Imagine a programmer that build amazing AIs on whatever hardware you give it, whether a top of the line GPU or an old PIC microcontroller.
The AIs runnable on both will not be fully equicapable† but the fact that you could get the PIC to do abstract learning or image recognition and learning at all will be incredible. It's like the fact that you can get a strong Chess AI running in just a few kb doesn't mean that Stockfish9 is unimpressive. It's rather, that such a strong chess AI can exist given such few resources is impressive.
Regarding intelligent AIs or space aliens with more computational resources, I'm biased but, I do think they'd be impressed with what we can do with only 20 watts or thereabouts.
* Yes I know spiders are not insects.
† Corvids and parrots are sort of exceptions to this. They can outperform certain primates even though they have smaller brains, fewer neurons (even if still high) while using less energy.
The thing is, it's not that hard for an animal (or a machine) to do one thing that we do, sometimes even to do it better than we do. But doing everything that we do, in the same package, is really, really hard.
The thing that blows my mind about humans is how adaptable our bodies are to virtually any task, terrain, climate, etc.
Goats are, in general, much better climbers than humans. But the best human climbers are WAY better than the best goat climbers. For example, I've never seen a goat climb El Cap.
Beavers, on average, are much better dam builders than humans. But the best human dam builders are WAY better than the best beaver dam builders.
One thing I feel doesn't get as much hype compared to intelligence is just how versatile our metabolism is. Animals often have very narrow selection of what they can use for food, and adapting to different kind of food source is very difficult. Humans though can feed on almost everything, plants, meat, raw, cooked, carb-, fat-, or protein-heavy - not all of it is equally good for us, but our digestion system will take whatever you throw at it and be fine mostly.
Indeed. Orcas are found all over the world, from the tropics to near the poles, in more climates than nearly every other animal in the wild -- but they are still only #2 in terms of climate adaptability. #1 is humans.
As for building dams, beavers evolved to build dams. They build dams because they're beavers. When humans build dams, it's because at some point in the past, some humans somewhere intuited that a dam would bring benefits (perhaps more water for fishing), figured out how to build one, and passed that knowledge onto other humans who were otherwise cognitively completely unprepared to build dams. As the knowledge was passed on, ways to improve the dam-building procedures were invented, and better tools were developed and used, to the point where the average human-built dam far exceeds even the best beaver dam. That makes the human story even more compelling.
Tying it back to the OP, we've seen that humans can train bees to associate symbols with counts, and that's remarkable. But if we find evidence of bees spontaneously inventing numeracy in the wild, and teaching it to other bees, that would be really something. And we'd better get ready to welcome our new insect overlords.
I always think what the perspectives of a being that could live for millions of years and had the computing power and memory and sensors of all of Earths machines would be. I don’t think we could even comprehend the thoughts of this being.
If you zoom out, the market - or even further, our civilization - is such a being. Only couple thousand years old, and essentially developed its nervous systems only in the last few decades, but already its thoughts are incomprehensible.
Yup. And the truth is, we might need to get comfortable with both. An ant is a living being, but it is also a self-propelled organelle of the anthill. Humans are living and thinking beings, but with near-lightspeed communication deployed worldwide, the whole humanity together becomes a superorganism that could be seen as thinking its own thoughts.
As humans, we've left the regime of biological evolution a couple thousand years ago, ever since we've learned to talk and write. Our entire development now happens a couple orders of magnitude faster.
In the past week I've taken a better look at the work of John C. Lilly, who actually writes on the subject: the earth becoming encased in machine intelligence, which eventually exits the solar system, in search of its own kind. He's not as far as I know a fiction author, but merely recorded his floating tank visions.
If you mean "you never said I had hands, gotcha", then yes you need to get hands first.
If you're talking about the physical task, I don't understand how that could be a problem. If you can move your body into a rocket, do that. If you can't, put a big dome over top, down to bedrock, and attach the rockets to the bedrock.
"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."
Although, based on the novels I suspect the jump from a bee to human level intelligence is probably rather small compared to that from a human to a Mind.
Well, bees don't invent controlled experiments to test our symbolic reasoning, think through the results, form philosophical questions using arbitrarily complex language structures, and post them on the own worldwide information-sharing networks they invented. So I'd say there's a pretty big gap.
> Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.
Assuming that intelligence can be quantified, and that extremely higher values are physically possible, yes, the orders-of-magnitude difference between bees and humans might theoretically be dwarfed by some other comparison. Just like the size difference between a grain of sand and a mountain is not significant compared with the difference between the mountain and the Milky Way. But it's still a massive (get it?) difference.
If bees can do this, how smart are we really? Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.
https://youtu.be/Tt0uV5d8tss