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by pron 3239 days ago
People also characterized doing arithmetic as intelligent, and there's little doubt that the entire idea of calulating machines -- from the time of Leibniz -- was motivated by the desire to emulate the human mind, so there's no point in describing intelligence as a binary quality. Therefore, I don't need to define what intelligent means in order to demonstrate my point. There are cognitive tasks that insects do better than computers, ergo, we are not yet at insect-level cognition. Only once computers can do everything better than an insect can we claim that they are more intelligent than insects.
1 comments

Humans can't do _everything_ better than insects, does that mean insects are more intelligent than humans?

Chimpanzees have better short term memory on certain tasks than humans [1] - humans not being better at _everything_ than chimpanzees doesn't make chimpanzees more intelligent.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/27199-chimps-smarter-memory-huma...

You are being very literal. That people are amazed that chimps are better at some particular task is exactly the point. It's the exception that proves the rule. When we're amazed that insects are better than computers at something we can start arguing over which is smarter.