The difference between humans and other animals is completely extrinsic; each human has an individual, outside entity that controls it. In other words, “You” are a consciousness that has hijacked a pre-programmed automaton.

I have a parallel ramble that elaborates my stance.

The main thing that differentiates human intelligence from animals is abstract thinking through language.

• There are multiple studies showing that isolated children who were not exposed to language developed to be less intelligent adults. [ although this could also be explained by their isolation :-D ]

I would characterise human learning into 4 main types:

1. We learn “genetically” through born instincts. Some of this is very complex! ( visual recognition of insects)
2. We imitate/practice other behaviour around us
3. We respond to good and bad stimulus
4. We learn from other peoples “stories” (we can read an algebra book)

I would think that we are gradually better at learning types 2-3 then most animals (Some animals are better at #1).

But it is #4 ( our ability to communicate abstract ideas to each-other) that sets us apart. It allows us to communicate vast knowledge across generations.

Think about it this way: Look at a “caveman”. You might imagine the tribe's abilities to be closer to that of a pack of Chimps than a modern family of humans. However, at some point in evolution if you take said caveman baby, and put it through a school it would be able to function as a normal human. Because regardless of how it was born, it could absorb a modern education with a multitude of ideas and skills learned through abstract learning. A chimp would not fare so well.

The same goes for a modern child. If you remove them from society (and theoretically raise them with chimps). They would not fare much better than a chimp at modern tasks.

Now consider a middle ground: Take a modern adult homosapien “savage”. Someone who was born and lived for 30 years in some forest in Brazil. You would also be hard pressed to make them excel in intellectual pursuits. You would probably not even be able to teach them to read. This would imply that society also plays a role in our intellectual abilities.

So I would think that what sets us apart from animals is our high ability to absorb inter-generational societal knowledge. Looking at the caveman example: our intelligence is not important as individuals, but rather as a society. It's our society's ability to learn as an intergernerational group that's most important.

Oversimplifying this into math terms (we're all engineers here): Generational knowlege is exponential: If we are 2 times as smart as a chimp, then within 10 generations our society is 1000 times “smarter”.

And what enables all of this is a complex language.

Regarding Machine Intelligence and Robots:
Older pre-programmed state machines only had type-1 intelligence (instincts). They were very good only at what we programmed to do.
Today's deep neural networks are very good at the #3 type of intelligence. They learn ( better than humans ) through stimulus. But they suck at everything else. The current holy grail of DNNs are to apply things learned from one problem space to solve other problems. Some baby steps are being taken, but it's not very good yet. One could argue that if this succeeds, it would be the beginning of abstract communication between machines. We are not there yet. At the moment, if you want a DNN to recognize a new type of stop sign, you would probably need to show it a million images. You would not be able to give it an abstract description. And if you wanted to recognize the smell of a cake, you would probably just start building your DNN from scratch.

I can point what we and animals have in common and pure logical systems (computers) don`t have: feelings.

Designing a humanoid robot that feels `real` is a matter of… logic. 90% of work that need to be done on such a robot has to do with navigation (ask JoeJ).

Not an expert but I think it's something that has to do with the way humans and animals' way of thinking have changed in that animals only look for the bare necessities to survive and have not thought about things like finding one's self like humans have. Animals only live to survive while humans live to create for future generations, expression, and the progression of the earth.

Calin said:

I can point what we and animals have in common and pure logical systems (computers) don`t have: feelings.

Designing a humanoid robot that feels `real` is a matter of… logic. 90% of work that need to be done on such a robot has to do with navigation.

This used to be the case in the past. Today with Deep Neural Networks, artificial intelligence can learn complex tasks through Semi-Pavlovian reinforcement: It responds to good and bad stimulus.

SillyCow said:
It responds to good and bad stimulus.

The final goal of animals is their own good, the final goal of men is the greater good. Both we and animals dump logic mid way. (skip logic and jump straight to the conclusion: we label short term situations/circumstances - helpful or adversary - as impending win or defeat, even if logically speaking they are not)

Animals do almost anything humans do. Just on a different level.

Whales speak between them. Termites, spiders, beavers, birds build. Monkeys, otters use tools. Cats are curious and explore. Crows learned to use trafic semaphores.

Animals can even learn words from the language of other species and use them -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEYCjJqr21A

Animals can fish -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Porp5v5lLKk

Animals can act. A lot of animals pretend to be death in order for the enemy to let them escape.

Animals can use a mirror -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akE2Sgg8hI8

I think if crows were properly motivated, they could create machines. They are just not motivated enough i think.

==================================

Lot of developers pretend to repeat a human. It really depends of the person. Narcissistic people would love to repeat themselves. I know humans can improve. There could be a species that is superior to humans. Narcissists think humans are on top of the awesomeness. I don't think so. There are lot of things to improve in humans. And there are various ways to go for it. One is genetic engineering. Other is creating a specimen better than the current humans in the virtual world. This is the General AI scenario.

Feelings are a bug in humans. In order to create something superior to humans, we need to get rid of feelings.

The narcissism of people who want to exactly repeat a human goes further than programming feelings. Such narcissists want to make their AIs mortal. They want to make their AIs make random fails to can look more human. I am sure, in the future, somebody would take a perfect robot and install on it an artificial cloaca to can drop pieces of rotten matter. "The worse it smells, the more human!"

Not to mention, wanting to make a robot more human could be moved by the most HORRIBLE motivations -

“Clients want robots to cry with real tears when they abuse them.”
“The new model of our robot will bleed when you hit it.”
“They cloned a real human spirit and put it inside the sex doll, in order the clients to feel like they own a real human sex slave.”(Ghost In The Shell reference)
“The zombies you kill in our game are anatomically correct, their reactions are physically accurate and in order to better emulate the suffer on their facial expressions, we recorded the real expressions of real people when they die in real situations. Now you can feel like you kill real people when you play our super realistic game.”
“You can not make a difference between our realistic game and a snuff movie. Buy it now!”
“In order to add more morbid perversion to our realistic game, we created a personal story for every of the enemies you kill. You can now watch how the familiars of the enemies you kill cry when they receive the notice of their beloved ones have died. Doesn't it feel morbid?!?! Buy our game now, you evil person!!! For an extra amount of money, you can buy the tears of these characters. REAL TEARS!!! We made poor people peel onions for money and we gathered their tears. Our product will make your morbid fantasies run wild. Buy it now!!!”

==========================================

A fair competition -

1- an AI that manages the taxes of people with the only goal in mind to distribute the taxes in the better way possible between people.
2- a human who steals tax money to buy gifts to his 30 years younger girlfriend. That same human, makes the prosecutor pardon any crime committed by his own children.

The second one is pretty human. Exactly perfectly human. More human than that impossible. Extreme injustice. The more unfair, the more human.

But, personally, i prefer an AI to handle my tax money.

(PS. Not every one who tries to repeat a human is narcissistic, but all narcissists, if they were given the task to create AI and being given freedom, would try to repeat themselves. The very sole act of repeating oneself is narcissistic.)

NikiTo said:
The very sole act of repeating oneself

One might actually argue that this is the basis of all life on earth. ( Including viruses ) ;-)

SillyCow said:
the basis of all life on earth

IMO you can`t answer all questions. Life is Change. You can have a dog but not forever. It will have pups which is dog as well but a different dog, the old dog will die. It would be boring otherwise, without multiplication life would be dull. all the same all the time. Take an intelligent system feed it with semi - chaos and you have life. Change is the definition of life though I don`t know what drives this change

SillyCow said:
One might actually argue that this is the basis of all life on earth. ( Including viruses ) ;-)

Yes. Indeed it is. Maybe transhumanism is a good candidate to make a difference between humans and animals.
Viruses and bacteria evolve pretty fast. They physically overcome their own species in a natural way. But it is not the same as transhumanism. With transhumanism, our intellect reaches completely new horizons. Somebody could right now pretend that he is a chair. But the cooler way humans can evolve is by using the effort of the group and the knowledge inherited from previous generations, the industrialization and exploration to evolve ourselves.

This not only is awesome because it includes so many fields of science, but it would mean that a human understands his own limitations, and tries to improve.

Although, right now i am not working to transhuman myself. Right now I want to create something better than humans. Ofc, at some point I would want to overcome my own ageing. Fix my eyesight. All my limitations, that i have not only as an individual, but as a human, and i am able to realize.

If you offer me the choice to genetically engineer my body to never age, and to unload myself to a computer, i would choose the computer. VR is the same as reality in case of cloning reality. And it could easily be much better than reality. A light saber can exist in VR super easy. But in real world a genuine light saber could never be physically possible. I don't know it. Maybe in the far future. What about magic in VR? You name it, you have it! In real world, i still can accidentally step in dog sh1t with my perfect immortal foot(when i hypothetically transhuman). VR is infinitely better. I have never seen an ugly number. Or a smelly byte. Even if in VR i step in dog sh1t, i can relax because i know it is only voxels. Ofc, if a player wants to dive deeply in sh1t, he could make himself forget that a sh1t is made of voxels. I don't want such a deep immersion. Motoko Kusanagi knows at any moment that she is made up of bits.

Humanity should stop being so narcissist. Every single movie promotes the idea: “humans are unique in the whole universe. Humans are priceless because of their feelings. The very top of awesomeness. No alien or machine possible is better than humans.”

I don't like that narcissism in human race. Maybe that's why aliens don't want to talk to us(a joke).

Aliens - “We can bend space and time.”
Humans - “But can you do hatred, envy, jealousy, betrayal, rape, murder? Eh? Do you have any of that, inferior alien?”
 

Any movie out there - alien/robot/god in a fight against a human. The human says “yes but we are superior because we are humans”, then the human starts to shout out loud, to roar and his powers start glowing around his body and…. you know what i am talking about - a typical Naruto/Holywood scenario.

I talked about that earlier in the thread - a hardcore nihilist when a robot takes his job - “Yeah, robots can perform better than me, but do robots have a soul like me, eh? I am superior!!”

I want to make clear that my work in the area of AI is silly at this point. By no meaning i try to sound like if i have an AI right now or i am able to create it. I am working on it. That's all. It could lead or not lead to something. It could take me 10 years or forever. I'm on it now, that's all.