On a species level though, the specific niche of human intelligence arose and filled an evolutionary niche, but that is not proof the same strategy will be better.
Bears fill an evolutionary niche of being able to last long times without food, having a wide diet and being very powerful, but that’s not a conclusion that a bear that’s 3x bigger, can eat even more things and can survive even longer without food would fare any better.
Indeed, quite the opposite, if a “better” version of a trait doesn’t exist that likely means the trait is optimized to an extreme.
And in terms of inter-species “achievements”, if the core things that every species want to do is “survive” then, well, it’s fairly easy to conclude cockroaches will outlive us, various grasses will outlive us or at least die with us, same goes for cats… and let’s not even go into exteremophiles, those things might have conquered planets far way from ours billions of years before we even existed, and will certainly outlive us.
Now, our goals obviously converge from those animals, so we think “Oh, poor dumb cockroaches, they shan’t ever advance as a species lacking x/y/z”, but in the umvlet of the cockroach its species has been prospering at an astonishing rate in the most direction that are relevant to it.
Similarly, we are already subpar in many tasks to various algorithms, but that is rather irrelevant since those algorithms aren’t made to fit the niches we do, the very need for them comes from us being unable to fill those niches.
On a species level though, the specific niche of human intelligence arose and filled an evolutionary niche, but that is not proof the same strategy will be better.
Bears fill an evolutionary niche of being able to last long times without food, having a wide diet and being very powerful, but that’s not a conclusion that a bear that’s 3x bigger, can eat even more things and can survive even longer without food would fare any better.
Indeed, quite the opposite, if a “better” version of a trait doesn’t exist that likely means the trait is optimized to an extreme.
And in terms of inter-species “achievements”, if the core things that every species want to do is “survive” then, well, it’s fairly easy to conclude cockroaches will outlive us, various grasses will outlive us or at least die with us, same goes for cats… and let’s not even go into exteremophiles, those things might have conquered planets far way from ours billions of years before we even existed, and will certainly outlive us.
Now, our goals obviously converge from those animals, so we think “Oh, poor dumb cockroaches, they shan’t ever advance as a species lacking x/y/z”, but in the umvlet of the cockroach its species has been prospering at an astonishing rate in the most direction that are relevant to it.
Similarly, we are already subpar in many tasks to various algorithms, but that is rather irrelevant since those algorithms aren’t made to fit the niches we do, the very need for them comes from us being unable to fill those niches.