Most humans have not spontaneously invented new usable alphabets, so I suppose that means most humans haven't meet the bar for true intelligence either.
I still don't understand this obsession for trying to define "hard AI" or "true intelligence" in binary terms. Intelligence is a spectrum, and deep learning has advanced it forward, thus making machines more intelligent -- yes, we can use that word 'intelligent' for computers just as we do for biological machines. Don't freak out.
Is it really so hard to accept that intelligence isn't all-or-nothing?
There is nothing preventing the computer for learning those connections however, so all you are doing is moving the abstraction layer. It's not a fundamental break point.
Happened already at Google and Facebook. Namely Neural Turing Machines have created an intermediate language, that's a more efficent encoding, without being designed to do so. See: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...
But that's really old news and DNCs are more capable, afaik.
In your example a computer could very easily learn those simple facts, just like you did. It's nothing to tell a program how to classify a piece of data. You didn't use some crazy learning when you attributed A to being part of a Latin alphabet, someone just told you that fact and you saved it and classified A into the Latin alphabet.
Humans being surprised by the computer should not be the yardstick for AI. A trained neural net can recognize the letter "A" and differentiate it from things that are not "A" but it does not know that "A" is part of the Latin alphabet and that there are other alphabets that form written human languages.
The day the computer spontaneously invents a new and usable alphabet without having been specifically designed to do so is the day I will concede we have hard AI. We have a long way to go. Until then it's just a bunch of hotdog/not hotdog classifiers.