| If neural networks have shown us anything, it's that not all neurons are born the same. After all, even in nature there are multiple types of neurons. I imagine it's 100% dependent on the cardinal rule of neural networks: "Choice of training data is 10 times more important than the actual model." What we have over elephants are opposable thumbs, excellent eyes, and vocal cords. And crucially, we're generally speaking pretty slow, weak and useless. Except for our elaborate methods of I/O. Our entire success is based on a feedback loop. "If human uses their IO this way, human will get more food." Thus, we become ever more sophisticated at this. We are nothing if not a vehicle for using our high dexterity, low gross force, opposable thumbs in inventive ways to get food. Plus, we have a biological imperative to pass these techniques on as knowledge. A baby elephant can probably feed itself by eating green stuff at 1 year old (I know nothing about elephants). A human child realistically cannot independently scrounge up enough solid food to sustain themselves, until they're what, twelve? Twenty-two? Certainly no younger than eight. We have, almost certainly, the most useless progeny in the animal kingdom. Hence we invest an enormous amount of time and energy in education to make them able to feed themselves. So the tl;dr is 1) Human brains are pretty similar to the animal kingdom's.
2) Human opposable thumbs are world class. Pretty close to as good as it gets. Sight is also top notch, many animals have useless eyeballs.
3) Most human food is obtained by doing creative things with thumbs. This is very complex, and takes a lot of practice.
4) Human birth the most useless children in the entire animal kingdom. These children take decades to fully grow, hence we invest an enormous amount of time educating them in opposable thumbs.
5) Over time our education system gets better and better, and our list of clever things we can do with opposable thumbs get longer and longer. Essentially what we have over the other animals isn't neurons. What we have over the other animals is a data collection/cleaning/utilization cycle. |