The question is if other animals even do have the kind of intelligence that most people call AGI. It seems that this kind of adaptive intelligence may be unique to mammals (and perhaps a few other outliers, like the octopus), with the vast majority of life being limited to inborn reflexes, immitating their conspecifics, and trial and error.
However, there are quite a few other species still around which are pretty intelligent (elephants, other great apes, whales and dolphins, octopi) so the development of intelligence may not be all that rare.
We know a great deal more about biological general intelligence than we do about AGI. Many animals create their own goals and work to achieve them. We learn what works and what does not, and adapt our strategies to compensate. Humans do this (obviously) but a lot of other intelligent animals can do it as well.
One of my favourite examples is the New Caledonian crows who have learned to use traffic to crack nuts [1]. Here, a crow had no pre-defined objective function apart from "eat food to stay alive" and has accomplished something remarkable. It found a food source that it had never had access to before, it developed a complex model of its urban environment, it combined its knowledge of the problem (the hard nut shell) with its knowledge of its environment (cars crush small objects), and it constructed a sophisticated for strategy for using cars to crack open the nuts and fetching the contents when the traffic lights indicated it was safe to do so.
I agree - 'intelligence', defined most broadly as 'ability to sense the environment, build a mental model of it, and use said model to achieve one's goals'^, seems like a very common adaptation.
^ This isn't just my definition, it's a rough approximation of AIXI, "a mathematical formalism for a hypothetical (super)intelligent agent". (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AIXI)
The difference between the intelligence of different creatures is one of degree, and it's interesting to speculate why some animals did end up so much more intelligent than others.
Another interesting evolutionary tidbit is that it for a while after the Cambrian explosion there was a vast diversity of different animal phyla in the oceans. Supposedly for some time there was an arms race of different invertebrate species (octopodes being one surviving example) evolving competitive strategies and counter-strategies, and thereby growing more intelligent.
But then fish evolved, and it turns out the fish design is highly efficient (think sharks) and fish could dominate the oceans - and later their descendant vertebrates could dominate the land - without needing as much intelligence. Again, it's interesting to speculate whether, in an alternative history where fish did not evolve, advanced invertebrate civilisations could have arisen long before dinosaurs appeared in our timeline.
The other great apes are quite intelligent and occupy the top spots in their ecological niches. Bottlenose dolphins pass the mirror test for self-awareness and appear to have individual names [1], and are at the top of their ecological niche. Elephants pass the mirror test and are at the top of their ecological niche. Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent for invertebrates, and are among the top predators in their niches. In the blink of an ecological eye, intelligence has started showing up at the top spots of the food chain across a diversity of different niches. Just because we haven't seen it before (e.g., the top dinosaur intelligence, the genus Troodon, only had a brain-to-body mass ratio comparable to modern birds [2]), doesn't mean it isn't adaptive - only that it took a while to evolve. Life existed for a pretty long time on Earth before it started running around on the land, too. Doesn't mean running around on the land is maladaptive.
The diverse examples of octopus, dolphins, elephants, parrots and great apes strongly suggests that intelligent life is not particularly rare. However the combination of a species' intelligence and an anatomy that can take advantage of the synergy between intelligence and tool making might be rare.
Octopuses and whales are two of the most interesting cases of high-level intelligence. Many species of whales actually have much more dense folding than our brains, and they are of course much larger. I know that larger brains are thought to be required for larger bodies, but I haven't seen reflection on that that considers aquatic animals have have different energy efficiencies than land based mammals. Given the social cohesion of some species, like orcas, I would not be surprised if their intelligence actually exceeds ours.
The other thing is that I think humans greatly and consistently underestimate the intelligence of almost all animals.
Knowing what we know about the variability within species, why would anyone NOT think that there is immense variations in intelligence in other mammalian species?
Especially a species that we've been selectively breeding for specific traits, some of which include independence and the ability to problem-solve?
Elephants, whales, octopi, etc didn't develop their intelligence independently from humans. We're all pretty closely related species that evolved from the same origins.
What would be interesting is if we found intelligent (or any!) life that evolved completely independently from our own origins.
But it's not qualitatively different from other species' intelligence. It's just a sample from a distribution, and as such, only a matter of time and speciation.
"Many animals can rival or exceed the intelligence of the average human"
Huh?
The only animal on Earth known to be capable of exceeding the intelligence of the average human is the above-average human. Octopuses, dolphins, chimps, crows, and elephants are all extremely intelligent, but let's not get carried away.
A lot of animals do possess general intelligence in the sense that they can adapt to a wide range of different situations(within what they're physically capable of).
Involving "human level" in this definition just makes it much more poorly defined.
It has always been pretty vague, it's hard to define a proper bar for intelligence let alone the intelligence of any specific animal. We just don't understand intelligence well enough (which is why in my opinion Zucc saying they want to work on AGI is at the level of if Musk or Bezos came out saying they want to work on FTL travel).
The fact that relatively high intelligence has arisen from many architectures multiple times on this planet bodes well for the frequency of intelligent life on exoplanets.
Even today, there are still biologists who assert the formation of intelligent life is tightly coupled to our specific brand of brain and should hence be considered a huge accident. Yet we see the formation of minds in a lot of places, and they can be almost arbitrarily far removed from the human brain.
The octopus is a great example for a radically different neurological substrate. Given enough time and a little bit of luck, some funghi too might evolve a mind of their own as Fuligo Septica already shows some capacity for problem-solving behavior.
The argument that human-like intelligence is again another unlikely step discards the myriad of social animals with advanced problem solving capabilities, some of which are even tool users, and some of which have actual languages and cultures. A lot of these have come onto the stage very independently from us, having sprung from far removed genetics - and yet they have enough in common with us that should make us recognize the frequency of species with minds might indeed be high wherever life takes hold.
Good point. I don't know, I'd like to learn more! I mean we aren't that different from other animals, especially our fellow mammals. And we're all part of nature and life. And it definitely seems like many animals have varying degrees of what we call consciousness or intelligence (octopus!).
At the same time there is an obvious difference, though perhaps one of degree and not of kind. The sophistication of our language, social structures, capacity for abstract thought, and toolmaking abilities. Stuff like that.
Wow interesting. There seems to be more and more evidence that orcas, dolphins, and octopuses are very intelligent.
I wonder if one of them would achieve human-like intelligence if they evolved for a billion more years. I would bet on it.
And then they would probably multiply without control, and kill off all their competitors.
On land, humans have done that. Although elephants are very intelligent, we're the smarter than them and outnumber them and all other animals by a large margin. We live on nearly every part of the earth.
It would be interesting/weird if the sea filled up with one large, intelligent animal that lived everywhere.
Its pretty great that so many branches of life, at least currently, seem to be developing intelligence (mammals, birds, octopus, even some fish). I'd really be curious to know how intelligent multi-cellular species from the past were. In my mind this suggests that there is some serious selection pressure for intelligence in evolution, at least here on Earth. If pressures were similar on other planets, mammalian-level intelligence might be fairly common among multi-cellular life on other worlds.
Most wild animals lack the cognitive and spatial abilities of octopodes, or match their use of tools. There is a difference between sprinting away and making planned, sapient decisions to escape.
The intelligence of some cephalopods is a controversial topic, as their limb dexterity and brain-to-mass ratios makes them unique, and they have some protection from research in the E.U.
Rats have played smarter tricks on me than any other animals I've seen. Sophisticated stuff involving quite precise guessing as to what my next steps would be. Call it theory of mind if you like. My dog is smarter in a generalised way, but boy can you do interesting things with a brain the size of a pea.
But the octopusses. The most fascinating part is not really their level of intelligence per se, but that it has evolved from scratch completely independent from us vertebrates. Bona fide aliens in our own backyard. Deep lessons on what converges and what doesn't.
reply