Fair for narrow tasks, but for general intelligence I think it will still need to account for the coordinates of real human intelligence; human intelligence as we know it is driven by intuition, emotion, preprogrammed evolutionary thinking, immersion in a culture and a language, etc. I don't think you can isolate a sort of pure reasoning module and with only that achieve general intelligence.

Either way I feel like the task of achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence is probably easier, since we have billions of examples of this type of intelligence surrounding us. Granted, even though we're immersed and surrounded by it, it's kind of absurd that we still can't really model it.

> achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence

but how do you know that human intelligence can be made super? May be there's limitations to human intelligence, and simulating it will not get us a super intelligence.

> It's almost an absurdity of our existence that we're immersed and surrounded by it yet still can't model it.

Good point. However, i think a facet of intelligence is how well a model the being under question can create of the 'real' world. Humans do a very good job compared to most animals, but there's plenty of room for improvement since humans only have limited data to model with.

A machine can have input from basically an unlimited number of sensors, which include things a human mind doesn't cope with (like EM rays not of the visible spectrum). Therefore, i postulate that an AI that simulate humans won't beat an AI that's ground up built to take advantage of more data.

We know some people are smarter than others, and that our brains are limited by the width of the pelvic floor. So who knows what a hypothetical human with a bigger brain could do?