That too, but this trend has been going on for decades in the field of linguistics. "Language is X," people say. Oh, it turns out that prairie dogs can do X. "Oh, well then language is X-prime!" Turns out parrots can do X-prime. "Oh, umm, maybe language is X-prime-prime! Whatever it is, only humans can do it!"
I find it pretty insane to argue that the human mind isn't somehow exceptional considering we're currently communicating through devices and massive infrastructure require centuries of research produced by those minds.
It's not the status of the human mind we're talking about here, it's definitions of 'language' and 'intelligence.' It seems offensive to some people that those labels might be applied to entities other than humans.
It makes sense that animals are smart in similar ways to how we are smart since they're using the same meat we are. Comparing us to computers is a bit offensive in my view.
I don't think anyone's arguing that we're not exceptional at all. After all, those prairie dogs aren't sitting around arguing about whether humans are actually on their level. Really what we're wondering when discussing AI is whether we're exceptional enough to build machines smarter than ourselves?
Has the Singularity already happened, and was it us?
