Just a reflection on human, artificial, extraterrestrial, and earthly intelligence.

What is intelligence, concretely speaking? It's a combination of cognitive abilities.

A living being can possess a certain range of cognitive capacities:
memory, intuition, reasoning, System 1 and 2 thinking, etc.

• For example, can insects actually reason (System 2)? Probably not.

And each of these abilities can have a maximum potential, determined by genetics.

• The maximum memory potential of an elephant is without a doubt higher than that of a cockroach.

And each individual also has a different capacity to use these abilities, depending on their environment:

• If you never challenge your brain, you'll take a long time to reach your full reasoning potential.

So, based on the number of cognitive abilities an individual has, their maximum potential, and how much of that potential they actually use…
you could, in theory, calculate a global average of intelligence for each individual—or even each species—if we had the data.

From that perspective, modern AIs are very intelligent, and they’re becoming more so every day:
in terms of the number of cognitive functions, their maximum potential (superintelligence), and the amount actually used (benchmarks).

With all of this in mind, we could probably design a kind of intelligence scale,
with level 0 representing the lowest possible intelligence,
and the upper limit being superintelligence.

We could also split this hypothetical scale into two major categories:

• Non-technological intelligences: all animals (and plants) on Earth, with one exception.
• Technological intelligences: humans.

We humans consider ourselves intelligent because we compare ourselves to other lifeforms around us—and label ourselves as "superior."

But I think it’s a bit irrelevant to compare technological intelligence to non-technological intelligence.

So what would it look like if we compared ourselves only to our own category…
in terms of number of cognitive capacities, their max potential, and how much we actually use?

Well, our maximum potential isn’t that impressive.
We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees.
We barely meet the threshold for being considered a technological intelligence.

And even in terms of actual exploited ability... let’s just say the national education system has some catching up to do.