Yet it's the only strategy that we're absolutely certain produces intelligent life.

Well, that it did produce intelligence once; not that it necessarily always does.

Although I do tend to think that given enough time (some millions of years), other intelligence will evolve on earth, from parrots or elephants or dolphins or octipuses or something. Though there's no evidence of a brain growth spurt that led to us, in other species; and it's not settled why we had it.

Are you absolutely certain we qualify as intelligent life?

edit: This comment isn't a joke, I mean this seriously. Modeling a system after ourselves may not be the best idea if we're not the best possible system.

It's a good question, and I think the answer is - up to a point.

We're biased towards individualism and the illusion of personal intelligence making clever decisions using its own resources, but in fact our real intelligence is collective.

Individually, most humans are a little bit smarter than other animals, but not much.

Humans are also excellent mimics. We learn by copying, and a lot of what we consider intelligence is copied behaviour and copied beliefs - often applied unconsciously.

So we've created systems - spoken language, writing, science, technology - that can externalise, collect, and preserve the best of our learning, so the species as a whole, including average humans, can get the benefit of it.

This works fine as far as it does, but our political and economic systems are still founded on animal logic (i.e. personal advantage no matter the cumulative long-term cost) instead of conscious collective intelligence amplification and species optimisation.

Based on this, AI won't get far unless someone invents an analogous way to externalise and abstract learning, so different AI projects can bootstrap each other, and there are common systems for abstraction and generalisation.

Unsupervised learning isn't going to be all that interesting unless it can do that. It'll be a fun toy for certain classes of problems, but it won't be anywhere close to an AGI.

An interesting question, but if we make a program that makes wry jokes about what it means to be alive or argues persuasively about its own freedoms, the world will notice.

You can define 'intelligent life' however you want. No matter how high you set the bar though, an algorithm that reproduces the intelligence of the average human and can be run in parallel at speeds unhinged by biological constraints would provide immense power, wouldn't it?

I think I'm more scared of creating an intelligent life form that isn't modeled after us. Maybe an irrational fear, but one I have regardless.