Our intelligence is related to brain structures, not all intelligence. You can't get to things like "what all intelligence, in general, is" from "what our intelligence is" any more than you can say that all food must necessarily be meat because sausages exist.

But that's unique in the sense of "you have a bag of ten apples and I have a bag of eleven apples, therefore my bag is unique". It's not qualitatively different intelligence than a dog's, you just have more of it.

> I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point.

Agreed.

> But you claimed that humans aren't unique.

I'm arguing that it is up to us to prove that they are interestingly unique in the context of this post. Which is pretty narrow - how do we solve problems?

The theme I was arguing against that I've seen repeated throughout this thread is that AIs are just recombining things they've absorbed and throwing those recombinations at the wall until they see what sticks.

It raises the question of why we presume that humans do things any differently, when it seems quite clear that we can only ever possibly do the same, unless we are claiming that knowledge of the universe can enter the human mind through some means other than through the known senses.

Not at all disputing that humans possess many capabilities that AIs do not.

> Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.

I touched on this elsewhere, will go ahead and paste it here again:

The fundamental thing I'm speaking out against is the arrogance of human exceptionalism.

This whole debate about what it means to be intelligent or human just seems like we're making the same mistakes we've made over and over.

Earth as the center of the universe, sun as the center of the universe, man as the only animal with consciousness and intellect, the anthropomorphic nature of the majority of the deities in our religions and the anthropocentric purpose of the universe within those religions...

I think this desire to believe that we are special, that the universe in some way does ultimately revolve around us, is seemingly a deep need in our psyche but any material analysis of our universe shows that it is extremely unlikely that we hold that position.

>The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date

What does this mean ? Are you saying every human could have achieved this result ? Or this ? https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/

because well, you'd be wrong.

>, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this.

Human intelligence was brute forced. Please let's all stop pretending like those billions of years of evolution don't count and we poofed into existence. And you can keep parroting 'simulacrum of intelligence' all you want but that isn't going to make it any more true.

> I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.

I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual.

What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so.

There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle...

But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).