In fact what nature invented was a persistent colony organism with external memory.

Wild solo humans are only a little smarter than wolves individually, but being able to share and externalise invention and learning created a massive advantage.

Humans are successful because although only a tiny minority of individuals are any good at invention, the fact that information persists and is shared means the entire population benefits.

The problem for AI is modelling the learning and invention process. Classifiers and recognisers are getting better, but they're not really learning in the human sense, which is a combination of abstraction, mimicry, and occasional invention.

IMO there's no chance of AGI developing until there's a persistent, transferable, abstracted model generated as an output from classifier systems and other learning machines which is a symbolic - not just a statistical - summary of the learning.

It can be compressed to "until AIs can talk".

Another way of putting it - the source of meaning is life, or death (prolonging life, avoiding death as much as possible). Reproduction is just the start of life. From this game of life and death come reward signals that teach us how to act in the world (our values).