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.
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.
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.
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.
Rinse and repeat for nearly anything.
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.
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.
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.
And at this scale it's already impossible to comprehend the motives of this organism.
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.