Are you suggesting that there is a binary property "intelligent or not"? In which case, what would progress even look like?
And I think it looks more or less like, "organic-in-relevant-way or not".
"Relevant" here means a type of organic-physiological adaptability which is able to operate on incredibly short time scales: ie., you're able to physically adapt your body as your environment changes at the second, minute, hour, day, ... decade, timescales.
Typing is a type of organic adaption which takes years to complete. As are essentially all of our skills.
With digital machines and robots we're maybe able to emulate our cognitive processes as they consider our body-environment relationship. But we have not emulated, at all, our ability to have this type of body-environment relationship.
Vague and undefined, mostly a hardware problem, not an intelligence problem
> detecting cancers and disease
AI is a strong tool for detecting many cancers, and in some areas of research, just using the same olfactory data as dogs: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> shepherding
Again, not so much an intelligence problem, but a hardware problem. Nonetheless
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/stress-test-au...
> protecting family from threats
In terms of ability to recognize and classify a threat, AI is clearly superior here. Dogs have terrible false positive rates.
Were such a car to exist, it is clear the dog would win in very very many environments (almost all). As would a mouse, let alone a dog.
That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there.
Personally, I dont even think that will be possible. Self-driving cars may work on highways and motorways; I don't see there being any in cities. Not for centuries.
(Absent pretty big engineering projects to make cities so overly sign'd that a non-intelligent automated system could navigate them. Consider, eg., existing automated trains & train networks.)
This seems incredibly unlikely. AI vastly outperforms 99.99% of humans on various video games, and 100% on many others. I'll bet on a well trained ml model over a dog every time.
> That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there.
We already have above average human performance with just normal road signs, and could also simply use digital information.
> Self-driving cars may work on highways and motorways; I don't see there being any in cities. Not for centuries.
Goalpost shifting
When natural disaster strike, people feel plenty of emotions, including anger. Often that anger though cannot be directed to anybody in particular. ("God isn't easily sued
When machines misbehave, being by definition human made, it's harder to accept it "as just the way the world works".
Centuries is a long, long time in science and technology. It is 2021. If we take "centuries" to mean two centuries, railways with steam engines were not yet a thing in 1821. Cars without horses much less so.
None of us can predict the state of computer science in 2221.