<story><title>Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bees-link.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>menzoic</author><text>Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson&amp;#x27;s comments on the &amp;quot;intelligence gap&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If bees can do this, how smart are we really? Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;Tt0uV5d8tss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;Tt0uV5d8tss&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cybiote</author><text>Your question is excellent but I sort of arrive at an opposite conclusion. Before I explain, I want to point out that bees and jumping spiders are exceptional as far as insect* intelligence goes.&lt;p&gt;The gist of my view is that evolution is the mother of all demo scene hackers. Imagine a programmer that   build amazing AIs on whatever hardware you give it, whether a top of the line GPU or an old PIC microcontroller.&lt;p&gt;The AIs runnable on both will not be fully equicapable† but the fact that you could get the PIC to do abstract learning or image recognition and learning at all will be incredible. It&amp;#x27;s like the fact that you can get a strong Chess AI running in just a few kb doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that Stockfish9 is unimpressive. It&amp;#x27;s rather, that such a strong chess AI can exist given such few resources is impressive.&lt;p&gt;Regarding intelligent AIs or space aliens with more computational resources, I&amp;#x27;m biased but, I do think they&amp;#x27;d be impressed with what we can do with only 20 watts or thereabouts.&lt;p&gt;* Yes I know spiders are not insects.&lt;p&gt;† Corvids and parrots are sort of exceptions to this. They can outperform certain primates even though they have smaller brains, fewer neurons (even if still high) while using less energy.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bees can link symbols to numbers, study finds</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2019-06-bees-link.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>menzoic</author><text>Reminds me of Neil deGrasse Tyson&amp;#x27;s comments on the &amp;quot;intelligence gap&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If bees can do this, how smart are we really? Compared to generally intelligent AI or extraterrestrials, the difference between our intelligence and a bees might not be much.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;Tt0uV5d8tss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;Tt0uV5d8tss&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taneq</author><text>The thing is, it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; hard for an animal (or a machine) to do &lt;i&gt;one&lt;/i&gt; thing that we do, sometimes even to do it better than we do. But doing &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; that we do, in the same  package, is really, really hard.</text></comment>