> intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up
In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know.
Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning experiments,”
https://thehorse.com/16967/navigating-barriers-can-horses-wa...
This is probably a variant of Andrew Ng's affirmation that ML can solve anything a human could solve in one second, with enough training data.
But intelligence actually has a different role. It's not for those repeating situations that we could solve by mere reflex. It's for those rare situations where we have no cached response, where we need to think logically. Reflex is model-free reinforcement learning, and thinking is model-based RL. Both of them are necessary tools for taking decisions, but they are optimised for different situations.
They will also open a gate to let another horse out of their stall which I would count as some form of planning.
Beyond that I can't think of anything in all the years around them. They can manage to be surprised by the same things every single day.
Sounds like most human beings, given an unpleasant stimulus, for example a spider.
Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities.
Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior:
1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle
2. Herds of wild horses reacting to perceived threats and then using topographic and geographic features to escape the situation.