Would be so funny if by the end of all the AI research, we found out the human brain is already the best you can ever get.
Seems rather unlikely. It's just whatever worked so far, evolutionary.
The belief of humans being the pinnacle of possible intelligences seems as naive as the belief that the earth is the center of the universe.
Another example is the bacteria. Some bacteria is so efficient it is literally approaching the limit of thermodynamics. You would need some of the most overengineered heat engine to match that kind of efficiency. And I guarantee you that we are far from able to make such a system as small and reliable as a bacterium. In fact if such a system were to appear right now, we would immediately call it incomprehensible alien technology.
> Here we show that metabolism by syntrophic associations, in which the degradation of a substrate by one species is thermodynamically possible only through removal of the end product by another species1, can occur at values close to thermodynamic equilibrium (ΔG′ ≈ 0 kJ mol-1)
Or this one: https://phys.org/news/2013-08-physicist-coli-replicate-therm...
On the second link, you may think that 600% is quite bad but that is the lower estimate of a vastly simplified system. The author himself stated this:
More significantly, these calculations also establish that the E. coli bacterium produces an amount of heat less than six times (220npep/42npep) as large as the absolute physical lower bound dictated by its growth rate, internal entropy production, and durability. In light of the fact that the bacterium is a complex sensor of its environment that can very effectively adapt itself to growth in a broad range of different environments, we should not be surprised that it is not perfectly optimized for any given one of them. Rather, it is remarkable that in a single environment, the organism can convert chemical energy into a new copy of itself so efficiently that if it were to produce even a quarter as much heat it would be pushing the limits of what is thermodynamically possible! This is especially the case since we deliberately underestimated the reverse reaction rate with our calculation of phyd, which does not account for the unlikelihood of spontaneously converting carbon dioxide back into oxygen. Thus, a more accurate estimate of the lower bound on β⟨Q⟩ in future may reveal E. coli to be an even more exceptionally well-adapted self-replicator than it currently seems.
Basically, for the amount of redundancies and complexity of an entire bacterium, the 600% total estimate is quite impressive. And when you actually get down to the single reactions, you see that it is exactly at the limit of thermodynamics.
The Arabs and Muslim astronomers who's invented the modern telescopes for astronomy observations most probably have already proposed the original heliocentric model centuries before Copernicus [1],[2],[3]. The fact the largest astronomic institution the world have ever seen at the time, namely House of Wisdom in Baghdad and all the associated astronomy books were burnt down by the Mongols meaning that the later European scientists have to scrapped by whatever astronomy books that had survived or already brought over to Europe including Muslim Spain [3],[4].
[1]How Islamic scholarship birthed modern astronomy:
https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-islamic-scholarship-bi...
[2]Arab astronomy: learning the language of stars:
https://wired.me/culture/arab-astronomy-the-language-of-star...
[3]How a Muslim invented the Telescope centuries before Galileo:
http://kn-ow.com/article/how-muslim-invented-telescope-245/
[4]How 9th century Baghdad revived astronomy:
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-9th-century-baghdad-re...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...
How many cycles does having an ego / idea of self take etc ?
The only long term advantages the human brain has is its extreme energy efficiency and ability to create/grow them outside of a multibillion dollar chip fab.