If you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak.
Cognition is (to me) not even the most impressive and out-of-reach achievement: That would be how (our) and animals bodies are self-assembling, self-repairing and self-replicating, with an impressive array of sensors and actors in a highly integrated package.
I honestly believe our current technology is much closer to emulating a human brain than it is to building a (non-intelligent) cat.
> if you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak.
flight is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple physics where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1700s.
I think the argument holds. It's not about how straightforward something is, it's that evolutionary time scales are incomparable to the time it takes to purposefully invent something. The ways these goals are achieved are just too different for time comparisons to make sense. If I was living in the 19th century, I could recreate the same argument by saying that it took nature X billion years since life appeared for animals to first take flight, so surely our technology ever catching up to it is improbable if not impossible.
I'm sure that intelligence is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple math where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1900s.
If you read about in a textbook from year 2832, that is.
As sibling comment points out, flight is physically pretty simple. Also, it took us centuries to figure it out. I'd say comparing to flight makes it look pretty strong.
Flight leverages well established and accessible world engine physics APIs. Intelligence has to be programmed from lower level mechanics.
Edit: put another way, I bet the ancient Greeks (or whoever) could have figured out flight if they had access to gasoline and gasoline powered engines without any of the advanced mathematics that were used to guide the design.
evolution isn't a directed effort in the same way that statistical learning is. The goal of evolution is not to produce the most inteligent life. It is not nessisarially an efficient process either.
The same "millions of years of evolution" resulted in both intelligent humans and brainless jellyfish.
Evolution isn't an intentional force that's gradually pushing organisms towards higher and higher intelligence. Evolution maximizes reproducing before dying - that's it.
Sure, it usually results in organisms adapting to their environment over time and often has emergent second-order effects, but at its core it's a dirt-simple process.
Evolution isn't driven to create intelligence any more so than erosion is driven to create specific rock formations.
