This set of experiments in the UK is helping robotic scientists create robot rats that behave a lot like real ones. It’s neat to think that this will eventually be able to use IBM’s rat brain research and make AI rat intelligences (and eventually people intelligences) that think just like the real thing. I just hope I live to see (and chat with) the human AI computers/robots.   No offense to the rat version though: “Wow, look at that freaking piece of old CHEESE!”

As AI research evolves I think it will become very clear that there is no “secret magic sauce” to animal intellect in general or to our human intellects in particular. Much of what people think makes us very special is simply due to confusing our innate human intellectual abilities (which are only modestly impressive) with the benefits of technologies that we have developed over years of learning and hundreds of years of societal evolution. Yes these technologies are a product of our collective human effort and intelligence, but it is not reasonable to assert that these are an indication of some vast level of intellectual superiority over dogs, cats, or fleas.

Rather it seems more likely that most human societies, over the past few thousand years, reached a technological tipping point where the technologies have allowed spectacular improvements in how effectively we can process information, food, shelter, transportation, etc.