yeah mathew'ed, I think we're talking past each other at this point. I was just making the distinction about how hard it is to get a program to create 'real intelligence' (like how the economy 'figures out the best price for things', that is an artificial construct also, but comes out of our numerous interactions to create 'spontaneous order', etc.). Machine learning is only fascinating right now in the fact that it makes something that is innate in us to look like 'intelligence' in something without our hardware, but it takes a lot of pre-programming and computing power. FWIW, I took a grad-level LISP AI course in college and tried to get a machine to solve a simple problem of getting a simulated monkey to use a ladder to get a banana. I had to give it all of the possible starting points and ways to make solutions; it was a pathetic 'magic trick' to be honest. The field is further ahead, but is moving at a snail's pace, compared to how much more powerful computers are today.
We humans can do some impressive stuff, but even as adults, we are absolute idiots from all sorts of perspectives. Also, our babies take all sorts of pre-programming (genetics) and computing power (brains, fueled successfully only by eating a whole bunch of stuff for many years), before they can perform the intelligent operations we adults can. Toddlers have years of learning under their belts, and they can still be pretty dumb sometimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLj0IZFLKvgAlso, EV2020, I will disagree that some of the things you mention we can do are really "intelligence" at all:
"It is what distinguishes our thought process from any other in existence - that we walk on uneven terrain without struggling to understand how we do it, find others attractive without knowing why, and enjoy certain things but dislike others, without any predictable pattern."
Finding others attractive without knowing why makes us sound stupid, and what we enjoy or don't is usually just related to what will increase our odds of passing our genes to the next generation. If some of our likes and dislikes are in fact an "unpredictable pattern", we're probably just too dumb to figure the pattern out.