If you share your home with a dog or a cat, look at it carefully and you will get a good overview of everything we don’t know how to do in artificial intelligence.
“But my cat does nothing all day except sleep, eat and wash herself,” you may think. And yet your cat knows how to walk, run, jump (and land on her feet), hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens – and the list is still very long.
Each of these actions requires processes that are not directly “intelligence” in the most common sense but are related to cognition and animal intelligence. All animals have their own cognition, from the spider that weaves its web to the guide dogs that help people find their way. Some can even communicate with us. Not by speech, of course, but cats and dogs don’t hesitate to use body language and vocalisation – meowing, barking, wagging their tails – to get what they want.