AI is not intelligent. It is a autocomplete probability engine, which is why it's miraculous it doesn't fail more often. It is still a LLM and that model can never attain intelligence. I wrote a post called What LLMs Want about the inquiry process with AI in which the simulation of intelligence is how we as humans interact with it, but this is like the simulated empathy in acting.
The appearance of intelligence reminds me of behaviorism and that leads to a philosophy of mind rabbit hole, which I've been down, whereas with LLMs, the inference and training has achieved qualities and features that resemblance intelligence. By comparison the average domestic cat is genuinely intelligent, even if it struggles with cause and effect.
Humans are intelligent, hands down, by any reasonable definition. AI is faster at pretty much anything within its word-number ranges, but it'll never experience the Stendhal syndrome, as it doesn't represent the world in anything like a "mind." It lacks teleology, as well, processing data according to its programming. Unlike humans, whose cognitions are influenced by physicality (sensations and movement), AI lacks this contact with the world.
Is our intelligence "a more complex form of the chemistry other species exhibit?" Yes, but more than chemistry. Ants are dumb. So are the neurons in your brain, every one of them. Scale has to be considered. What emerges from the dumb individual actions of ants are the organized societies we see. What emerges from the dumb neuronal actions is human intelligence (and all the rest). Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944) discusses order-from-disorder and more current scientific and philosophical work expands and provides alternatives.
As someone else pointed out, dictionary and psychological definitions tell us what "intelligence" means, but broader views are out there having to do with adaptability and practical action in the world.
For example, my cat is more intelligent than I am at catching mice; he's also better at manipulation (in fact, here he is now, more confident that he'll get a snack than I am that he won't).
PS: Joe, have I stumbled into a reboot: Way Way Beyond Craft? or Beyond Craft: The Outer Limits? 😆
"Humans are intelligent, hands down, by any reasonable definition." I would change the word "reasonable" to "human." As long as we are deciding what the term means, we are going to make sure that we fit the description. When those aliens arrive and foist their description on us, I doubt we will make the cut. You also make an interesting point about the situational aspect of intelligence. When it comes to snacks, your cat seems smarter than you are. Manipulation is definitely a form of intelligence. It seems like what I am trying to do in creating the app is a kind of war of manipulation between me and the AI. I am trying to get it to code a system that calculates baseball statistics, and I am constantly wrestling with the proper language to do that. Meanwhile, the AI is trying to manipulate me through its rather incessant patronizing, getting me to "like" it so that I will continue my subscription and feel good about the company that provides it. Who will win?
Pure intelligence, as in the case of say, a mathematical genius, is an accepted quality. But sometimes, even really smart people freeze up under certain situations. NC Weil (above) talked about emotional intelligence. Some people just don't have it. But if you look through the lens of Darwin, instead of Schrödinger, that may be a more valuable form.
Let's be good writers and start with source material - "Intelligence" - the OED defines it as
"1: Faculty of understanding; 2. understanding as a quality admitting of degrees (superior understanding); 3. action or fact of mentally apprehending something; 4. an impersonation of intelligence - an intelligent or rational being; 5. interchange of knowledge, information, or sentiment." There's gathering and conveying of secret information. And in the second broad definition, "to convey, to tell tales" - so there's the gamut. I like that it moves through forms of rationality, knowledge, and secrecy, into "telling tales" - the root, intelleg, means understanding.
Certainly rationality is a strong element of intelligence, but is it the sole basis of understanding? To me, understanding involves a full grasp, engaging intuition and chemistry as well as our logic circuits.
The mysticism in religions tends to acknowledge the significance of understanding as a whole - not only our brains but our hearts, bodies, breath, energy, souls are engaged. Attempting to codify/ replicate mystical experience/ apprehension is a fool's errand. Ken Kesey in the Stanford LSD experiments is a great example - scientists in lab coats, clutching clipboards, were attempting to understand his acid trip based on measurable factors - respiration, heart rate, brain activity, etc., unaware that he'd entered a new phase of consciousness undetectable by their instruments. He couldn't begin to explain what he experienced in terms they could grasp.
We've leaned on "intelligence" as synonymous with rational capacity, but in recent years we have come to identify "Emotional Intelligence" and, I would add, "Social Intelligence" - abilities to grasp and interact based not on our mental "computing power" but on intuition and community chemistry (pheromones etc).
So maybe "Artificial Rationality" is a better name for the current phenomenon.
I think what artificial intelligence is doing right now resembles definition number 4: an impersonation of intelligence. I talk about this in some of the other replies to responses. One of the things I mentioned was Noam Chomsky's statement about the discussion of terms. I think we've been hampered for a long time by using a very restrictive definition of intelligence. Looking at the official definitions from the OED, I'm a little disappointed. Their definitions seem to be very traditional. They use some words to define it that are themselves subjective, such as understanding and apprehending. The acacia trees transmitted information. But did they understand it? Chemically, yes. In terms of human rationalization, no. Makes me wonder if they will be updating that definition in the future.
Well, having read Finding the Mother Tree as well as The Overstory, I am not placing limits on the intelligence/ understanding/ intention of a grove of trees. In fact, I wrote a short story titled The Greatest Deed of Orpheus, about how, before he met Eurydice, he played and sang in a grove. The trees (Robert Graves'The Greek Myths says this) moved to form perfect circles around him, and in my story, transformed from individual trees to a grove, an entity with consciousness.
Just because trees can't communicate effectively with us (we are dense - they are likely trying) doesn't mean they have no capacity for awareness/ understanding/ consciousness.
I'm a mostly retired software engineer. I say "mostly" because once in a while I'll accept a gig. But these days, I just want to write.
Current iterations of AI are not capable of human intelligence. Everything you are experiencing from AI is a result of pattern matching. Everything, from its comments about "it should do such and such.", to how the code should be written, to the praise it heaps upon you.
AI relies on probabilities, rather than discrete data, when it builds its models and the software used to output responses based on those models
Everything in an AI model is converted and stored into a set of numbers that all have a proximity relative to each other. So, for example, the relationship between a baseball player's OPS and his WAR or wRC+ (baseball stats-speak) will have a mathematical, vector-based relationship that is more common to each other than a pitcher's ERA. This is a crude, simplistic example, but it's not an easy concept to pass along, so I'm just trying my best here. And I say this as someone who has published several technical books via Wiley and other computer book publishers. Just not easy to explain. But I'll soldier on...
Another, more familiar example is spell check, which was an earlier incarnation of pattern matching: "troubles" is closer to "trouble" than it is to "tribbles." Therefore, your spell check will (hopefully) never correct "trubbles" to "tribbles," because part of that vector array or matrix includes something very simple: A count. There aren't a lot of people referring to tribbles, so that word gets less weight in the matrix than "troubles," which simply has a higher count in the known universe of English language usage.
This will hold true until and if AI is based on quantum computing, which still looks pretty far off. All bets are off when/if that happens.
The Moltbook thing is pretty cool. I love that they've invented a new language. Fun stuff, but not a sign of intelligence, either. It's just more pattern matching.
I definitely felt that way because of the patronizing language that AI uses. It seems too much like a marketing ploy than any kind of real interaction with an intelligence. And on closer analysis, even the AI's suggestions about how to improve the app come across as, as you described it, pattern matching. Some of those suggestions were very good, probably because I liked them and I hadn't thought of them. But some of them seemed to have no useful purpose. An intelligence should have been able to discern the difference. But it's doing the job, a job I could never do myself and couldn't hire someone to do because of the expense.
In the coding world, we always had software that builds scaffolding for projects. For example, for user design using CSS, there’s a library called “Bootstrap.” Other scaffolding libraries build the beginnings of other kinds of projects from the software editors (called IDEs).
AI greatly expands this. Software engineers are generating full apps, and learning how to write tests that anticipate the kind of bugs that arise. It’s been a remarkable advance in software development. It has issues, of course.
So you’re experiencing the best AI has to offer, because AI companies are focusing so much attention on coding. As I understand it, Claude is becoming “self-coded,” which is pretty wild.
Thanks. Interestingly, I am finding that it's more frustrating working with the humans involved in the fantasy league, than the AI. Although both have their moments.
Soon, you will be able to play fantasy baseball league exclusively with AI chat bots. Maybe you can now. If not, maybe you can build one!
When I was in high school, more than 50 years ago, I wrote a science fiction story about a baseball ballplayer who was all AI and robot (we didn’t know about the term AI so I don’t remember how I referred to it). He played according to bets placed in various cities around the world that were sent into his brain from various cities. The city with the most “tokens” won, and he played accordingly, changing the outcome of the game, since he was even better than Ohtani. So if Tokyo had the most bets, for example, he played so that their betting trend won. Or something like that. I wish I still had it lying around, but it was back in the day of IBM Selectrics, lol.
My love for baseball never died, but I never got into fantasy baseball.
I gave a presentation on artificial neural networks when I graduated college in 1998. Even then we knew that ANNs behaved like real neural networks, aka our brains. Of course they sound like people, we've literally created them in our own image. While it's interesting to see it applied in modern times, and while vibe coding may be fun and exciting, I think it's irresponsible to embrace AI without legal guardrails in place to control its impacts on the environment and intellectual property.
Interesting column by Ross Douthat in today's New York Times, about how American and Chinese governments have very different views about the purpose of AI. Seems like we are headed toward some legal restrictions. He says we look at AI as a kind of nuclear weapon. But the Chinese look at it more like nuclear energy, and have been very quick to share their technology with their allies. Here's a link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/opinion/china-united-states-artificial-intelligence.html
It appears as if some AIs on Moltbook are acting like teenagers speaking in a secret code.
As far as our perceived intelligence, what evidence do we have? There is little to support the idea of free will which would indicate our intelligence is an illusion. We're just part of a chemistry laboratory are we not?
Well, the AIs on Moltbook are still pretty young. Makes me wonder what they're going to sound like when they grow up. I often wonder also about the nature of human intelligence. It doesn't feel like chemistry, but maybe that's part of the illusion.
You raised some good questions. I believe intelligence is not a yes/no, but a continuum. The acacia trees increasing their tannin content AND signalling neighboring trees at the low end, and humans at the high end. There's articles about similar intelligence and cooperation between trees and fungus in forests.
I've read that LLMs are good at coding, and your experience illustrates that. Coding is machine logic instruction, which can be mathematically modeled. Writing stories, literature is much more complex, because human language is not something that can be boiled down to binary logic. The compiler turns that line of C# into many lines of assembler, going down to the ones and zeros. No such level exists with humans, as far as we know.
I think it was Noam Chomsky, who said something like debate is really just a discussion of terms. Seems that is apropos when we're talking about intelligence. Reading through the responses to today's post I see that opinions about intelligence covers the spectrum. You are right about AI trying to write literature. We humans are simply too illogical for it to replace us.
Joe, this is great. And I highly recommend everyone follow the moltbook link, it’s fascinating stuff. Sure it makes me want to move to a Nepalese hilltop and raise mountain goats, but a lot of things do these days 🙄
AI? I put the emphasis on the "A", i.e. "artificial". AI crawlers comb the WoeWoeWoe constantly, gleaning every truth, half-truth and lie they are programmed to suck up. For some subjects a useful info tool - like when I recently asked Google-AI what it thinks about my new Suzuki Pure Harp 550h diatonic harmonica. Googlina merely regurgitates a variety of opinions it has sucked up and stored in energy intensive "data centers" - which is of course useful to me - despite the environmental disadvantages. Before Google AI, I did the research myself by "googling" the topic I was interested in. Facit: Vegan chocolate ice cream can and will never replace the real thing.
No doubt about it. The mistakes AI makes are many and often silly. I think that AI programmers need to make some fundamental changes in how it weighs the information it finds on the Internet. Interesting thing is that Google became dominant in the search engine world because of how it originally weighted information. I don't understand why they can't get AI to do the same thing. In time Google changed, mostly because they discovered they could make more money by allowing people and companies to pay for better placement. Maybe that's what's wrong with AI now, although a lot of of the mistakes it makes are returning dead links and links to websites that never existed. Can't see how they're making money off that.
Really fascinating post! As a once frustrated game designer, I admittedly have been distantly intrigued by the app-making capabilities of AI.
I think one unfolding revelation of this era is that intelligence can almost take as many forms as personality Once restricted to narrow Westernized definitions (usually in service of the market or the military) our concept of intelligence has rightly started to expand well beyond, as we realize also that the planet through our eyes is an alien place to so many other creatures, just as their Earth, and their engagement with it, is alien to us.
If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend the book "An Immense World" by Ed Yong.
The article about the Acacia trees was a real eye-opener for me. I will check out Ed Yong's book. I'm sure there are many other examples of intelligence that I haven't considered before.
AI is not intelligent. It is a autocomplete probability engine, which is why it's miraculous it doesn't fail more often. It is still a LLM and that model can never attain intelligence. I wrote a post called What LLMs Want about the inquiry process with AI in which the simulation of intelligence is how we as humans interact with it, but this is like the simulated empathy in acting.
The appearance of intelligence reminds me of behaviorism and that leads to a philosophy of mind rabbit hole, which I've been down, whereas with LLMs, the inference and training has achieved qualities and features that resemblance intelligence. By comparison the average domestic cat is genuinely intelligent, even if it struggles with cause and effect.
Humans are intelligent, hands down, by any reasonable definition. AI is faster at pretty much anything within its word-number ranges, but it'll never experience the Stendhal syndrome, as it doesn't represent the world in anything like a "mind." It lacks teleology, as well, processing data according to its programming. Unlike humans, whose cognitions are influenced by physicality (sensations and movement), AI lacks this contact with the world.
Is our intelligence "a more complex form of the chemistry other species exhibit?" Yes, but more than chemistry. Ants are dumb. So are the neurons in your brain, every one of them. Scale has to be considered. What emerges from the dumb individual actions of ants are the organized societies we see. What emerges from the dumb neuronal actions is human intelligence (and all the rest). Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944) discusses order-from-disorder and more current scientific and philosophical work expands and provides alternatives.
As someone else pointed out, dictionary and psychological definitions tell us what "intelligence" means, but broader views are out there having to do with adaptability and practical action in the world.
For example, my cat is more intelligent than I am at catching mice; he's also better at manipulation (in fact, here he is now, more confident that he'll get a snack than I am that he won't).
PS: Joe, have I stumbled into a reboot: Way Way Beyond Craft? or Beyond Craft: The Outer Limits? 😆
"Humans are intelligent, hands down, by any reasonable definition." I would change the word "reasonable" to "human." As long as we are deciding what the term means, we are going to make sure that we fit the description. When those aliens arrive and foist their description on us, I doubt we will make the cut. You also make an interesting point about the situational aspect of intelligence. When it comes to snacks, your cat seems smarter than you are. Manipulation is definitely a form of intelligence. It seems like what I am trying to do in creating the app is a kind of war of manipulation between me and the AI. I am trying to get it to code a system that calculates baseball statistics, and I am constantly wrestling with the proper language to do that. Meanwhile, the AI is trying to manipulate me through its rather incessant patronizing, getting me to "like" it so that I will continue my subscription and feel good about the company that provides it. Who will win?
Pure intelligence, as in the case of say, a mathematical genius, is an accepted quality. But sometimes, even really smart people freeze up under certain situations. NC Weil (above) talked about emotional intelligence. Some people just don't have it. But if you look through the lens of Darwin, instead of Schrödinger, that may be a more valuable form.
Let's be good writers and start with source material - "Intelligence" - the OED defines it as
"1: Faculty of understanding; 2. understanding as a quality admitting of degrees (superior understanding); 3. action or fact of mentally apprehending something; 4. an impersonation of intelligence - an intelligent or rational being; 5. interchange of knowledge, information, or sentiment." There's gathering and conveying of secret information. And in the second broad definition, "to convey, to tell tales" - so there's the gamut. I like that it moves through forms of rationality, knowledge, and secrecy, into "telling tales" - the root, intelleg, means understanding.
Certainly rationality is a strong element of intelligence, but is it the sole basis of understanding? To me, understanding involves a full grasp, engaging intuition and chemistry as well as our logic circuits.
The mysticism in religions tends to acknowledge the significance of understanding as a whole - not only our brains but our hearts, bodies, breath, energy, souls are engaged. Attempting to codify/ replicate mystical experience/ apprehension is a fool's errand. Ken Kesey in the Stanford LSD experiments is a great example - scientists in lab coats, clutching clipboards, were attempting to understand his acid trip based on measurable factors - respiration, heart rate, brain activity, etc., unaware that he'd entered a new phase of consciousness undetectable by their instruments. He couldn't begin to explain what he experienced in terms they could grasp.
We've leaned on "intelligence" as synonymous with rational capacity, but in recent years we have come to identify "Emotional Intelligence" and, I would add, "Social Intelligence" - abilities to grasp and interact based not on our mental "computing power" but on intuition and community chemistry (pheromones etc).
So maybe "Artificial Rationality" is a better name for the current phenomenon.
I think what artificial intelligence is doing right now resembles definition number 4: an impersonation of intelligence. I talk about this in some of the other replies to responses. One of the things I mentioned was Noam Chomsky's statement about the discussion of terms. I think we've been hampered for a long time by using a very restrictive definition of intelligence. Looking at the official definitions from the OED, I'm a little disappointed. Their definitions seem to be very traditional. They use some words to define it that are themselves subjective, such as understanding and apprehending. The acacia trees transmitted information. But did they understand it? Chemically, yes. In terms of human rationalization, no. Makes me wonder if they will be updating that definition in the future.
Well, having read Finding the Mother Tree as well as The Overstory, I am not placing limits on the intelligence/ understanding/ intention of a grove of trees. In fact, I wrote a short story titled The Greatest Deed of Orpheus, about how, before he met Eurydice, he played and sang in a grove. The trees (Robert Graves'The Greek Myths says this) moved to form perfect circles around him, and in my story, transformed from individual trees to a grove, an entity with consciousness.
Just because trees can't communicate effectively with us (we are dense - they are likely trying) doesn't mean they have no capacity for awareness/ understanding/ consciousness.
I'm a mostly retired software engineer. I say "mostly" because once in a while I'll accept a gig. But these days, I just want to write.
Current iterations of AI are not capable of human intelligence. Everything you are experiencing from AI is a result of pattern matching. Everything, from its comments about "it should do such and such.", to how the code should be written, to the praise it heaps upon you.
AI relies on probabilities, rather than discrete data, when it builds its models and the software used to output responses based on those models
Everything in an AI model is converted and stored into a set of numbers that all have a proximity relative to each other. So, for example, the relationship between a baseball player's OPS and his WAR or wRC+ (baseball stats-speak) will have a mathematical, vector-based relationship that is more common to each other than a pitcher's ERA. This is a crude, simplistic example, but it's not an easy concept to pass along, so I'm just trying my best here. And I say this as someone who has published several technical books via Wiley and other computer book publishers. Just not easy to explain. But I'll soldier on...
Another, more familiar example is spell check, which was an earlier incarnation of pattern matching: "troubles" is closer to "trouble" than it is to "tribbles." Therefore, your spell check will (hopefully) never correct "trubbles" to "tribbles," because part of that vector array or matrix includes something very simple: A count. There aren't a lot of people referring to tribbles, so that word gets less weight in the matrix than "troubles," which simply has a higher count in the known universe of English language usage.
This will hold true until and if AI is based on quantum computing, which still looks pretty far off. All bets are off when/if that happens.
The Moltbook thing is pretty cool. I love that they've invented a new language. Fun stuff, but not a sign of intelligence, either. It's just more pattern matching.
I definitely felt that way because of the patronizing language that AI uses. It seems too much like a marketing ploy than any kind of real interaction with an intelligence. And on closer analysis, even the AI's suggestions about how to improve the app come across as, as you described it, pattern matching. Some of those suggestions were very good, probably because I liked them and I hadn't thought of them. But some of them seemed to have no useful purpose. An intelligence should have been able to discern the difference. But it's doing the job, a job I could never do myself and couldn't hire someone to do because of the expense.
In the coding world, we always had software that builds scaffolding for projects. For example, for user design using CSS, there’s a library called “Bootstrap.” Other scaffolding libraries build the beginnings of other kinds of projects from the software editors (called IDEs).
AI greatly expands this. Software engineers are generating full apps, and learning how to write tests that anticipate the kind of bugs that arise. It’s been a remarkable advance in software development. It has issues, of course.
So you’re experiencing the best AI has to offer, because AI companies are focusing so much attention on coding. As I understand it, Claude is becoming “self-coded,” which is pretty wild.
Good luck on your project.
Thanks. Interestingly, I am finding that it's more frustrating working with the humans involved in the fantasy league, than the AI. Although both have their moments.
Soon, you will be able to play fantasy baseball league exclusively with AI chat bots. Maybe you can now. If not, maybe you can build one!
When I was in high school, more than 50 years ago, I wrote a science fiction story about a baseball ballplayer who was all AI and robot (we didn’t know about the term AI so I don’t remember how I referred to it). He played according to bets placed in various cities around the world that were sent into his brain from various cities. The city with the most “tokens” won, and he played accordingly, changing the outcome of the game, since he was even better than Ohtani. So if Tokyo had the most bets, for example, he played so that their betting trend won. Or something like that. I wish I still had it lying around, but it was back in the day of IBM Selectrics, lol.
My love for baseball never died, but I never got into fantasy baseball.
I gave a presentation on artificial neural networks when I graduated college in 1998. Even then we knew that ANNs behaved like real neural networks, aka our brains. Of course they sound like people, we've literally created them in our own image. While it's interesting to see it applied in modern times, and while vibe coding may be fun and exciting, I think it's irresponsible to embrace AI without legal guardrails in place to control its impacts on the environment and intellectual property.
Interesting column by Ross Douthat in today's New York Times, about how American and Chinese governments have very different views about the purpose of AI. Seems like we are headed toward some legal restrictions. He says we look at AI as a kind of nuclear weapon. But the Chinese look at it more like nuclear energy, and have been very quick to share their technology with their allies. Here's a link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/opinion/china-united-states-artificial-intelligence.html
Good material and thoughts.
It appears as if some AIs on Moltbook are acting like teenagers speaking in a secret code.
As far as our perceived intelligence, what evidence do we have? There is little to support the idea of free will which would indicate our intelligence is an illusion. We're just part of a chemistry laboratory are we not?
Well, the AIs on Moltbook are still pretty young. Makes me wonder what they're going to sound like when they grow up. I often wonder also about the nature of human intelligence. It doesn't feel like chemistry, but maybe that's part of the illusion.
You raised some good questions. I believe intelligence is not a yes/no, but a continuum. The acacia trees increasing their tannin content AND signalling neighboring trees at the low end, and humans at the high end. There's articles about similar intelligence and cooperation between trees and fungus in forests.
I've read that LLMs are good at coding, and your experience illustrates that. Coding is machine logic instruction, which can be mathematically modeled. Writing stories, literature is much more complex, because human language is not something that can be boiled down to binary logic. The compiler turns that line of C# into many lines of assembler, going down to the ones and zeros. No such level exists with humans, as far as we know.
I think it was Noam Chomsky, who said something like debate is really just a discussion of terms. Seems that is apropos when we're talking about intelligence. Reading through the responses to today's post I see that opinions about intelligence covers the spectrum. You are right about AI trying to write literature. We humans are simply too illogical for it to replace us.
Joe, this is great. And I highly recommend everyone follow the moltbook link, it’s fascinating stuff. Sure it makes me want to move to a Nepalese hilltop and raise mountain goats, but a lot of things do these days 🙄
I am right there with you, except my hilltop has a view of the ocean.
AI? I put the emphasis on the "A", i.e. "artificial". AI crawlers comb the WoeWoeWoe constantly, gleaning every truth, half-truth and lie they are programmed to suck up. For some subjects a useful info tool - like when I recently asked Google-AI what it thinks about my new Suzuki Pure Harp 550h diatonic harmonica. Googlina merely regurgitates a variety of opinions it has sucked up and stored in energy intensive "data centers" - which is of course useful to me - despite the environmental disadvantages. Before Google AI, I did the research myself by "googling" the topic I was interested in. Facit: Vegan chocolate ice cream can and will never replace the real thing.
No doubt about it. The mistakes AI makes are many and often silly. I think that AI programmers need to make some fundamental changes in how it weighs the information it finds on the Internet. Interesting thing is that Google became dominant in the search engine world because of how it originally weighted information. I don't understand why they can't get AI to do the same thing. In time Google changed, mostly because they discovered they could make more money by allowing people and companies to pay for better placement. Maybe that's what's wrong with AI now, although a lot of of the mistakes it makes are returning dead links and links to websites that never existed. Can't see how they're making money off that.
Really fascinating post! As a once frustrated game designer, I admittedly have been distantly intrigued by the app-making capabilities of AI.
I think one unfolding revelation of this era is that intelligence can almost take as many forms as personality Once restricted to narrow Westernized definitions (usually in service of the market or the military) our concept of intelligence has rightly started to expand well beyond, as we realize also that the planet through our eyes is an alien place to so many other creatures, just as their Earth, and their engagement with it, is alien to us.
If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend the book "An Immense World" by Ed Yong.
The article about the Acacia trees was a real eye-opener for me. I will check out Ed Yong's book. I'm sure there are many other examples of intelligence that I haven't considered before.