It is an interesting exercise to think what might/must be common to all intelligences and what could vary.
The first thing that strikes me is whether we have one large intelligence or many small intelligences interacting. Humans collectively are pretty bright, and as we get more humans and better tech for communicating, it seems that the effective General Intelligence of the planet continues to rise. But even 25 humans together in our ancestral environment are probably at least a few times the GI of each individual human. But what of an intelligence that develops large but in isolation? Communication would presumably be quite difficult with such a creature as it would not have needed to communicate to get to where it was. It might not even care that we are intelligent if it developed in isolation.
I think Orson Scott Card's "hive mind" was a nice attempt at an alien intelligence developed with significant differences from human. Sort of what would happen if the ants or bees had an intelligence explosion at the hive level, not at the individual organsim level. That humans could communicate with Card's queen may have been the weaker part, presumably a hive mind would have minimal communication with other hive minds and so not have evolved much interest or algorithms supporting communication with something like an equal.
In humans, we have many organisms nearly identical that must cooperate to bring up effective GI of the group. Other sci-fi writers have written races with different levels of intelligence in the organisms that make up the civ. In some sense, Homo sapiens is just unlucky that all the other Homo XXX are extinct. Our closest living relatives are quite a bit less organized than we are, and way too different to interbreed with. Had we grown up with a few different Homo XXX in our civ. we'd probably find it a lot less obvious that dictatorship or racial prejudice or slavery is "wrong." It seems likely that the more efficient ways to organize society would reflect the inequality of the organisms. (And after all we do keep dogs as slaves with neither the dogs nor many humans complaining about this. Clearly it is a sliding scale.)
we do keep dogs as slaves
Slavery is defined as "humans as property" and so has a negative connotation. This term is not applicable to livestock and pets, unless you are a member of PETA.
Today's post, Humans in Funny Suits was originally published on 30 July 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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