Gary Marcus

Of course, current A.I. doesn't get near even chimp level general intelligence (though it surpasses even human performance on some kinds of tasks)...

Current AI doesn't even get near *mouse* intelligence--and a great deal of what mice (and most other animals) do is innate. If we could get achieve artificial mouse intelligence, we'd have a good foundation for human intelligence.

I agree. At least if that is the type of artificial intelligence we are after - the kind that allows a wee beastie like a mouse to do all the cognitive operations necessary for mouse survival

And I would argue most of the brain is devoted to this kind of adaptive control of behavior. And it would be super cool to build AI like that - as artificial agents...

But is that what AI folks want? Or are they after the ability to perform abstract reasoning and other really intellectual operations better than humans can?

Indeed, what AI folk want is abstract reasoning. They tried jumping straight to it under the Minsky Symbolic AI program, which failed. Maybe we can jump straight to human cognition with ML, but i'm skeptical. I think we need to pass through mouse intelligence. Short jump to human

a. premature argument to say "symbolic AI" failed (using < .01% current compute) when deep learning could have been dismissed in same way in 2009 b. ignores hybrid neurosymbolic models. c. it's not that short a leap, inasmuch as vast majority of mammals did not evolve language

Yes, most animals didnt evolve language. But language evolved in a blink, ~200Kyrs (or 1Myrs, if you think Neanderthal and Denisovan had language). And population sizes were small, and generations long, which suggests it's a very easy evolutionary step for apes to get language.