True in the case of owls, though in the case of AI we have the luxury and challenge of making the thing from scratch. If all goes correctly, it'll be born tamed.

It just means that the intelligence gap was smaller, potentially much, much smaller, when humans first started developing a serious edge relative to apes. It's not evidence for accumulation per se, but it's evidence against us just being so much smarter from the get go, and renormalizing has it function very much like evidence for accumulation.

Sure, I still don't think that if you elevated the intelligence of a group of chimps to the top 5% of humanity without adding some better form of communication and idea accumulation it wouldn't matter.

If Newton were born in ancient Egypt, he might have made some serious progress, but he almost certainly wouldn't have discovered calculus and classical mechanics. Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is really important.

Eh, not especially. IIRC, scores have also had to be renormalized on Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests over the years. That said, I'd bet it has some effect, but I'd be much more willing to bet on less malnutrition, less beating / early head injury, and better public health allowing better development during childhood and adolescence.

That said, I'm very interested in any data that points to other causes behind the Flynn Effect, so if you have any to post don't hesitate.

I would say one of the key strong points about the fable of the sparrows is that it provides a very clean intro to the idea of AI risk. Even someone who's never read a word on the subject, when given the title of the book and the story, gets a good idea of where the book is going to go. It doesn't communicate all the important insights, but it points in the right direction.

EDIT: So I actually went to the trouble of testing this by having a bunch of acquaintances read the fable, and, even given the title of the book, most of them didn't come anywhere near getting the intended message. They were much more likely to interpret it as about the "futility of subjugating nature to humanity's whims". This is worrying for our ability to make the case to laypeople.

Do you have any examples of approaches that are indefinitely extendable?

Interestingly enough, a team at MIT managed to make an AI that learned how to play from the manual and proceeded to win 80% of it's games against the AI, though I don't know which difficulty it was set to, or how the freeciv AI compares to the one in normal Civilization.

I would bet heavily on the accumulation. National average IQ has been going up by about 3 points per decade for quite a few decades, so there have definitely been times when Koko's score might have been above average. Now, I'm more inclined to say that this doesn't mean great things for the IQ test overall, but I put enough trust in it to say that it's not differences in intelligence that prevented the gorillas from reaching the prominence of humans. It might have slowed them down, but given this data it shouldn't have kept them pre-Stone-Age.

Given that the most unique aspect of humans relative to other species seems to be the use of language to pass down knowledge, I don't know what else it really could be. What other major things do we have going for us that other animals don't?