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Humans 'took over the planet' and displaced billions of other animals just by being smarter. Why wouldn't AI agents do the same? Our intelligence relates to physical mechanisms somehow, and computers are a much faster and more efficient way of implementing similar things, so why wouldn't computers be able to do so better? Look how rapidly technology is integrated into human life and the economy, won't that just continue to accelerate as it has over the past 300 years? What does a human do, what happens to the economy, when complex AI interactions drive more and more of it?
There's some debate on that, there's a competing theory that we "took over the planet" because we had language and could thus learn from events that we ourselves did not witness.
Transformers and large neural nets generally are universal ML system that can do moderately-intelligent tasks like create images, play games, optimize all sorts of real-world tasks, and also understand language. Human intelligence is similar - use and understanding of language depends and is made of general intelligence. If dogs could talk, they wouldn't be smarter. And - they can talk, sort of, they have verbal and body-language signals that mean things, they just can't do larger-scale things with that.
This feels like affirming the consequent/assuming the conclusion.
If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter? How much rougher would the lions' life be if the Buffalos and Gazelles could collude?
yes, dogs can't play sports (even if they had the right physical form factor) or compose music as well as humans despite neither requiring language. buffalos can communicate, and do, the ability to understand complex communications wold require intelligence, and even if they had that minimal intelligence that doesn't get them to toolmaking, let alone physics or military planning. is this a bit?
No, because it seems equally clear that intelligence doesn't get you that far on it's own.
... sure, and humans minus hands wouldn't get anywhere, same for humans without eyes, humans without mouths, humans without livers, humans without an epidermis, or humans without collagen, but it's quite clear that intelligence is a more significant, harder to evolve factor than language or any of those. Plus, as neural networks hint at and should be somewhat clear, intelligence means that language is relatively easy to get to, whereas w/o intelligence language is not that useful because nothing too interesting can be said!
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